WINNER: Best Feature Film, Berlin International Film Festival
"Silva sticks it to a comfortable, complacent and presumably morally liberal audience … and twists the knife, to thought-provoking ends." – Hollywood Reporter
Freddy and Polly are trying to have a baby together. They aren’t a couple: Polly is single, and Freddy lives with his boyfriend, Mo. With its haute Bohemian locations and its hectic, hand-held style Nasty Baby presents itself as something familiar. Mo, Freddy and Polly live the good life, in which gratifying work, nice friends, fulfilling leisure and good food are not aspirations but entitlements. Anything that’s missing (like a baby) can be acquired without too much trouble.
But what had looked like a meandering, anecdotal story turns out to be a carefully constructed narrative machine, one that dispenses a brilliantly nasty series of surprises. Nasty Baby is not really a loving farce about non-heteronormative reproduction and multicultural friendship. Without leaving Mo and Freddy’s leafy, brownstone-lined street, Mr. Silva transports us to a much deeper, darker place. As misunderstandings spiral from awkward to horrifying, the gentle tickle of comedy is replaced by the barb of satire, and the audience’s smile of recognition is replaced by a grimace of complicity.
A. O. Scott
The New York Times
