Shiva Baby (2021) Movie Review
Writer and director Emma Seligman’s debut feature film Shiva Baby is going to be hard for her to top! The film takes place over the course of one day when lost and confused college student Danielle (Rachel Sennott) has to attend a Jewish funeral service with her parents. Debbie (Polly Draper) and Joel (Fred Melamed) are concerned about their daughter but suffer from being overly anxious about her and her future.
Danielle seems a trifle lost, at the funeral service but also in life in general. She doesn’t want to be there in the first place due to some incident with a girl named Maya (Molly Gordon). Early on it’s heavily alluded that she and Maya had some history that her parents would rather not address. Danielle is continuously trying to dodge Maya throughout the morning and afternoon. This is made even more complicated when her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari) shows up. Her two worlds colliding sends Danielle into a tailspin as she tries to juggle the multitude of lies she has told to a variety of people. The situation escalates as we learn that Maya and Danielle went to prom together and hooked up which explains why Danielle’s mother seems so alarmed each time she sees the girls talking.
In addition to this bombshell, we learn that her sugar daddy Max is in fact married and his wife shows up late to the function. And a superb bonus is that he has a kid! While this might seem like a spoiler (and it vaguely is, sorry) you still need to watch Shiva Baby to see how it all unfolds. Seligman expertly crafts a building tension and unease that persists throughout the entire one hour and seventeen minute runtime. It verges on the edge of feeling like a horror movie at times with the pacing and the camera angles. In a way it is a horror movie for Danielle. Her worst nightmare of having her sugar daddy and her actual father in a room together is happening and we get to witness it. It’s not just about the sugar daddy aspect though, which made me appreciate Shiva Baby even more. We’ve all had to attend family functions at some point when we aren’t proud of who we are or where we are in life. Making forced small talk with family, friends, or your parents’ friends when you’d rather be literally anywhere else is annoying and exasperating.
Seligman captures Danielle’s trials beautifully and in a short time displays the complex relationships she shares with her parents, with Maya, with Max, and even with herself. Seligman keeps you on your toes and you truly don’t know what will happen next. For her part, Rachel Sennott is fantastic. She is forced through a myriad of emotions and problems that she handles like a pro. Sennott goes through almost every emotion in the book and does so with the ease of someone who has been acting for thirty years. It would be really easy to dislike her character, Danielle, but Sennott somehow manages to make her relatable and sympathetic. She’s a mess but she’s trying and she is suffering under the immense pressure young twenty-somethings feel to have their lives figured out and live up to their family’s expectations. Even if you’re not in your twenties, it’ll bring back the memory of feeling totally and utterly lost. The yearning to fit in and have everything “together” bleeds through the screen in ways that will shock you. Despite having a simple plot, Shiva Baby provides a unique character study with tension mounting as secrets are painstakingly revealed.
You’ll like this movie if:
1. You like character driven dramas
2. You are in your twenties
3. You can identify with feeling lost and misunderstood
