Never have the words “sent from my iPhone” been so chilling. Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s acclaimed one-man play, which hammered out the horrifying story of his experience of being stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha, who he meets at the pub where he works. She gets hold of his email address, and starts to message him, incessantly, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, all through the night, every night. The emails end with, “sent from my iPhone”. In the show, Gadd’s alter ego, Donny Dunn, has a realisation: Martha doesn’t have an iPhone. At first, Baby Reindeer is chilling in small instances like this. But as Martha’s behaviour becomes more obsessive, and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two become locked in a terrible downward spiral. This is a self-loathing horror that is relentlessly bleak.
It is a true story, it tells us at the outset, very Netflixishly. Gadd first took Baby Reindeer to the Edinburgh fringe in 2019 as an hour-long play, crunching the story down into its harrowing essentials. Martha existed only as an empty bar-stool, and Gadd used multimedia and recordings of messages she had left him and people close to him, in order to flesh it out. I saw it that year, and was left stunned by the palpable fear it left in its wake. The ending was devastating. You can only pity the people who might have heard of Gadd as a standup and popped in to see if he was going to make them laugh.
Television is not theatre, however, and this is not Gadd addressing an empty bar-stool. Over seven episodes, it has to do more. Gadd takes bits of his previous work to allow the story to sprawl out over bigger and more ambitious spaces. He’s not quite playing himself: Donny is a struggling comedian and writer, desperate for success, who enters competitions with surreal prop-based comedy that is more miss than hit. Martha is rendered real, with a knockout performance from Jessica Gunning, who manages to convey everything from pity to heartbreak to vicious and violent malice, often with a barely perceptible adjustment of her expression. It is not an easy role and she is truly fantastic in it.
When Martha walks into Donny’s pub one day, in tears, he offers her a cup of tea. It is the first of many terrible decisions that leads him into a world of suffering, though for reasons that later become clear, the question of vulnerability is uneasy and multilayered. Donny is flattered that Martha takes an interest in him, and he pays her a sort of attention in return. But Martha turns out to be a serial stalker who is, as the police later tell him, a “serious” person, and once she fixates on the man she nicknames her “baby reindeer”, she inveigles her way into every corner of his life.
Baby Reindeer is shot remarkably well. It looks like a horror film. There are uncomfortable closeups; unsettling, just-tilted angles; a disorientating creepiness built in to the aesthetic of it. It is frightening at times, horrifying at others. The pressure builds and builds. Gadd has not flattened out the moral complexity of the play for television. If anything, he has gone deeper into the grey areas. Of its many challenging themes, it deals with shame, cruelty, self-loathing, banter, ego, pity, mental illness, culpability, loneliness, the policing of stalking, desire, hard drugs, hope and despair. Gadd asks impossible, unnerving questions and pegs them to the mast of trauma. Is he engaging with Martha when he knows he should not because he feels sorry for her, or is he doing it because he sees the situation as potential material? When Martha first appears at one of his comedy gigs, they spar with each other, and the audience laps it up. Next time, their interaction is not so audience-friendly. Who, in this situation, is the cruel one?
Inevitably, Baby Reindeer makes for stressful and often distressing viewing; in describing it as “still piercingly funny”, the marketing bods at Netflix are the only ones having a laugh. Over the series, the sheer onslaught of pain is difficult to endure, and what it gains in scope, it loses in focus. “Surely it couldn’t get any worse from here,” says Donny, at one point. Reader, it does. Eventually, this makes for frustrating viewing. Yet at the same time, it is original, compelling, and unforgettable. Episode four, in which we find out more about Donny’s state of mind, is one of the most disturbing and upsetting episodes of television I have seen in a long time. I suspect it is also extremely important that what it depicts is depicted, and examined and explored, on screen. Come forewarned and expect to be rattled.
• Baby Reindeer is on Netflix.
