Nasty Baby

Freddy (Sebastián Silva) and Mo (Tunde Adebimpe) are a gay couple in NYC. They're trying to have a baby with friend Polly (Kristen Wiig). Freddy discovers that he has low sperm count. Mo is reluctant to contribute. Freddy is a performing artist making a short of adults acting like babies. The group gets harassed by local homophobic unstable Bishop (Reg E. Cathey).

This is a rambling indie at first. The starts as a low-budget mumbling gay lifestyle artsy New York indie. It sprinkles in some darker tones and then it takes a completely different dark turn. It's intriguing although it doesn't completely work.

Grotesque (Noun) - A distortion of reality, often comic or satiric in nature.

Sebastian Silva has a knack for making films that mask simmering malice, danger, and outright evil in a playfully subversive manner. "The Maid" featured a long-time servant out to make mischief for her callous employers. "Magic Magic" detailed the slow crack-up of an innocent and naive California blonde as she's dragged deep into the bowels of South American ethnicity (read: Reality).

Silva himself stars in this latest excursion into unwanted reality, one his character, Freddy, seems just as terrified to face: that of fatherhood. Freddy lives in an airy Brooklyn apartment with his partner Mo (Tunde Adebimpe). He's a visual and performance artist who's got a child's attention span (and general life attitude): flighty, not overtly responsible or aware of other's feelings, and prone to fits of rage that mask an underlying self-hatred and nonacceptance. Throw into this emotionally thick stew Freddy's fixation on getting his best friend Polly (Kristin Wiig) pregnant with Mo's sperm (as Freddy's isn't up to the task - ouch), an obsession with an oddly self-conscious performance art piece that articulates his own fear and loathing, and a crazy neighbor who's becoming more and more aggressive in his assaults. There's enough TNT here to detonate the most stalwart brownstone.

Most of Freddy's fears and neuroses are down-played in Nasty Baby, just as Juno Temple's were in "Magic Magic" and Silva is good at this. Mo, Polly, and even Wendy, Freddy's assistant (the sparkly Alia Shawkat, who also produces here) can see the cracks and the film does a good job at slowly turning up the seismic rumble under the surface.

Reg E. Cathy (miles away from his displaced Barbecue chef on House of Cards) is an effectively unstable menace who constantly pushes Freddy's self-hatred buttons with homophobic slurs and taunts. Does Freddy really want a child? Or is it something he feels he must do to complete some kind of bohemian ideal or even his latest performance piece? Nobody around him seems sure, even his elderly gay neighbor (the superb Mark Margolis) who's seen his share of battle wounds from just being himself.

Nasty Baby eventually erupts in an unexpected and nasty way that I won't spoil. It's satisfying though not in a real audience-pleasing manner, but you can see the terror and dread in Silva's face up until the end. It's anything but light entertainment, but like all of Silva's films it will make you think and will hold up over repeat viewings. The iTunes commentary, with Silva, Adebimpe, and Wiig is a hoot, by the way.

Pretty lousy for the most part, though it does arrive at a compelling (if not original) conclusion. Director Sebastian Silva stars along with Tunde Adebimpe as a gay couple in New York City who are thinking about having a baby with their best friend, Kristen Wiig. Not much really happens plotwise for the first hour or so, though a conflict arises between the trio and a mentally unhinged, homophobic man who lives in their neighborhood (Reg E. Cathey). He often follows Wiig around in a threatening manner, and likes to throw homophobic slurs at Silva and Adebimpe as they walk down the street. Alia Shawkat (who co-produced! How desperate do you have to be to hit Alia Shawkat up for money?) and Mark Margolis also co-star.

Nobody can say writer/director/actor Sebastián Silva lacks creativity and ingenuity as a young filmmaker. His film Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus, while being frustratingly quirky and an overall unpleasant experience for me years back, did show that Silva had a talent for concocting pretty bizarre scenarios with an ethereal vibe in their cinematography. Silva's latest directorial effort, Nasty Baby, comes very close in giving off the same kind of young, upstart filmmaking tendencies of Jay and Mark Duplass, but it's a film that gets bogged down by a serious sense of misguided direction in its third act that almost makes the film's pillars collapse under the weight of its incredulity.

Spoiling the film would be criminal, so expect me to dance around the events with great detail. The story revolves around a European immigrant named Freddy (played by Silva, who also wrote the film, as well) and Mo (Tunde Adebimpe), a gay couple who are trying to have a child of their own and enlist in the help of Polly (Kristen Wiig) to be their surrogate mother. This wouldn't be such a chore, but due to Freddy's low sperm count, his numerous attempts to impregnate Polly have resulted in nothing but frustration. Freddy is also a prolific actor and starving artist, and his latest project is a short film titled "Nasty Baby," which will show him portraying a screaming infant (just when I thought Mark Duplass's role in Creep that had him making a video for his unborn son to enjoy was the peak of strange).

The bane of the trio's existence comes in the form of a mentally ill neighbor they know as "The Bishop" (Reg E. Cathey). Despite their acts of kindness, "The Bishop" continuously bothers them with his erratic and unpredictable behavior, going as far as almost sexually assaulting Polly in broad daylight. "The Bishop," while initially seeming like a petty character in the lives of these three, consistently finds himself being a common problem as they try to go about their daily lives unbothered, especially given the stressful circumstances they're currently facing.

Nasty Baby is a film that works largely because it's free-form and unwilling to conform to a discernible plot for much of its runtime. It admirably rejects form, and that makes it easy to believe that this is a film about three realistic characters that are simply going about their days. The vibes the film gives are so natural and nuanced that even the quirkiness of Freddy making a video of him acting infantile is a believable inclusion, despite its most illogical entrance into whatever remnants of a plot this film bears.

Nasty Baby's issue comes when it decides to introduce a plot - a considerably dark and sad one, at that - late in its third act. It's as if, in that very moment in his screen writing, Silva forgot to really introduce a bigger, more identifiable conflict for his characters, and as a result, the final twenty minutes of the film feel very forced and rushed in attempting to introduce, remedy, and eventually solve the newly introduced problem for their characters. Had Silva stopped dawdling with the screenplay and introduced this conflict earlier, maybe at the fifty-minute mark, this film could've been the best of both worlds - a largely free-form exercise in indie, LGBT filmmaking, in addition to a compelling black comedy/drama.

Instead, this feels like a film that doesn't really find its very real problem or identity until it's too late to really leave a meaningful impact. The overall effect of introducing such a huge and potentially life-altering situation to the characters with only about twenty minutes left in the film not only is unfair to the film's characters, but the audience members, who will undoubtedly emerge feeling a sense of disconnectedness and discomfort thanks to a film showcasing such a monumental event before solving it and cleaning it up like it was nothing at all.

With all that in mind, Nasty Baby is just sporadically funny enough to be deemed a comedy, and wisely punctuated by enough sadder or more dramatic moments to also fittingly earn the title of a drama. Silva's quirky narrative, for the most part, doesn't get the best of him, and the trio of performances from the main cast is particularly strong, with the standout being Wiig in another performance that needs just the right amount of eccentricity and humanity to make it work (see Adventureland and The Skeleton Twins for her other strong performances at playing smart, if disconnected). This is a film that works marginally well for the most part of its runtime, teetering on the edge of silliness and sophistication until the point where it reaches its climactic arc, which should've been its second major conflict throughout. At that point, we see that Silva has been piloting a ship that he knows how to operate but doesn't really know how to steer and doesn't find out until the ship has sailed well past it's destination.

Starring: Sebastián Silva, Tunde Adbimpe, Kristen Wiig, and Reg E. Cathey. Directed by: Sebastián Silva.

Chilean director Sebastián Silva's Sundance premiered sixth feature NASTY BABY is an oddity in queer cinema, it ostensibly starts to tackle with a topical issue of gay couples, after homosexuality has been reckoned more or less as a normalcy in America, - parenthood, but rounds off with a shark-jumping bang. Freddy (director Silva himself) is an European immigrant, from Spain, one divines, he is a performance artist lives in New York with his black boyfriend Mo (Adebimpe, leading singer from TV on the Radio). Freddy and his bestie Polly (Wiig) are both broody: Freddy is caught up in his new project named "Nasty Baby" which involves adults imitating baby behaviours, it is absolutely nonsensical both on paper and in its eventual form, while Polly, at one point is joked by Freddy as a"semen vampire", she is not young anymore, so timing is also crucial for her whether she could ever become a mother. Naturally, they decide to having a baby together, only to their dismay that Freddy's sperm count is too low. So Freddy is egged to persuade Mo as the sperm donor, and the latter eventually caves in.

Meanwhile, a mentally impaired vagrant Bishop (Cathey) lives nearby begins to wrack the trio firstly by leaf-blowing in every early morning across the street of Freddy and Mo's apartment, then physically pestering Polly several times and constantly hurling homophobic abuse at them, anyway he is cuckoo, and Silva ascertains that the aversion to Bishop is plain vicarious.

Time goes by until a mood-shifting third act happens on the day when Polly phones Freddy that she is not pregnant with Mo's semen whereas the truth is otherwise, she only wants to give him a surprise later to cheer him up after knowing Freddy's Nasty Baby is cold-shouldered by the gallery owner initially shows interest but backtracks. On his way to his apartment, a tetchy and smouldering Freddy encounters Bishop again, and this time, there will be blood! The film changes its gear bluntly from a blanched mumblecore to a noirish thriller saturated with consternation and fumbles (a hallmark deer-in-the-headlight will arrive later as an over-obvious metaphor). It is a wayward move notwithstanding, but what Silva brings home to audience is the elemental homicidal urge resides in those carefree hipsters, whom we are half-heartedly rooting for until that crunch. The trio is going to become parents of a mixed race baby, but a callous truth is that not only they have no instinct to save one when they can, they also unanimously chooses the other way around, on a deceitful ground that man is a scourge, despicable and expendable, yet, he is still an egalitarian human being, when bringing a new life into this world and extinguishing an old one (assumably with the same skin color) has been juxtaposed in that fashion, it electrifies viewers to jump on that cynical old question: how can we keep our inner demon at bay and raise a child free of such contamination? That's my takeaway of this unorthodox indie fare when being steeped in the catchy closing-credits anthem: Ida Corr and Fedde Le Grand's LET ME THINK ABOUT IT. There is some food for thought left, but also one cannot help feeling being short-changed.