Baby Ruby

Noémie Merlant headlines this often-creepy, sometimes wandering psychological horror about a new mother experiencing the postpartum depression from hell.

Every now and then Hollywood comes up with a movie about motherhood that’s designed to reach into women’s maternal instinct center and give it a mighty shake. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” is the classic choice; “Not Without My Daughter” is another.

“Baby Ruby” isn’t quite as deliberately exploitative as those films, operating more as a psychological horror starring French actress Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) as a new mother experiencing the postpartum depression from hell.

Her character, Joséphine, comes to believe that her daughter hates her, and that vaporous evildoers are plotting to steal her away. She becomes paranoid and resentful, pushing away her husband, mother-in-law and friends as she descends further and further into a twisted labyrinth of her own mind… or is it?

Often very creepy but sometimes wandering and dull, the movie is written and directed by Bess Wohl, a veteran playwright and actress making her debut behind the camera. She shows a nice touch for getting inside her main character’s mind, though the narrative pacing can be lax.

Joséphine is a very much 2020s type of woman — young, smart, beautiful and accomplished. She works as an influencer, which as near as I can tell is people (almost exclusively female) who share lots of photos of themselves living a wonderful life, and suggesting it could be yours too if you buy stuff from their sponsors.

Her popular blog, “Love, Joséphine,” has chronicled her amazing young life, which has recently included marriage to Spencer (Kit Harington), a hunky butcher — of sustainably farmed meat, of course! — moving to upstate New York and renovating a beautiful secluded mansion, complete with the picture-perfect nursery for a baby girl.

Despite her semi-fame and the adoration of her staff, including assistant Caroline (Camila Canó-Flaviá), Joséphine has a hidden side where she’s unsure of herself, as evidenced by the way she waits for adoring comments to come flooding in to each new post she makes.

Things start to go awry when she goes into labor, which she barely remembers as a vaguely threatening swim of nightmarish imagery. The medical staff is helpful but in a do-what-we-say kind of way, such as when they’re leaving for home and a nurse hands off a cooler containing the placenta for Joséphine to eat.

(Which, some stomach-churning Googling later, I learn is a real thing.)

Baby Ruby is a vision of infant perfection, big blue eyes and appled cheeks. But she cries. A lot. To the point her mother can barely function coherently. “All babies cry,” Joséphine is told over and over again, including by her doctor (Reed Birney) in a way that’s gentle but dismissive.

Joséphine goes into a fog, unable to tell when it’s night or day, barely able to sleep, getting bitten during breastfeeding, her perfect home turned into a ramshackle of strewn blankets, bottles, takeout food and so on. She’s astonished when Caroline shows up at her door telling her fans are begging for baby pictures to be posted, because a whole month has gone by.

Things go on from there. Joséphine begins to grow resentful of Spencer’s mother, Doris (Jayne Atkinson), despite being the only family member able to drop by and help. Doris has a blowsy way of intruding where she’s not been invited, but shares a brutally honest conversation with her daughter-in-law about how tough her own new motherhood was.

Speaking of honesty, “Baby Ruby” gives as accurate a portrait of what it’s like to be living with a newborn as I’ve seen onscreen. It’s a joy, and a prison. You get scratchy with your partner and blow up at the slightest interruptions from the outside world, like the guys coming to install new gutters. You suddenly realize that 98% of your free time, just the ability to sit and be yourself, is gone.

The intriguing thing about “Baby Ruby” is it takes all those very normal experiences and common anxieties and heightens them to the nth degree, letting them wander over into the macabre. Plenty of mothers (and fathers, too) have wondered, “Am I going crazy?”, and here we see that played out with the aid of traditional horror tropes like ghostly figures appearing in the baby monitor and such.

Exacerbating Joséphine’s anguish is that her bucolic (unnamed) town seems filled with other mothers cheerfully pushing around their baby strollers, having chatty get-togethers, wearing fabulous clothes, all made up and instantly back to their pre-baby figures. Meredith Hagner plays Shelly, the most outgoing of these Stepford Moms, and like Spencer and Doris starts getting suspected by Joséphine of nefarious intent.

Merlant gives an invested, haunted performance, though to these eyes it seems a strange choice to break into mainstream American movies. Maybe her accent gives the character an additional shading of otherness that underscores how disconnected Joséphine comes to feel.

Parenthood is a dream that can often feel like a nightmare, and here’s a movie that gives full measure to the feelings everyone has but pretends aren’t there.