‘Baby Reindeer’ Review: A Devastating Examination Of Trauma And Abuse

Baby Reindeer is one of the best Netflix Originals I’ve ever seen, though it ended up being quite a lot darker and more disturbing than I expected. In its trailers and marketing, Richard Gadd’s adaptation of his one-man play (based on a true story) appears to mostly be about his character’s encounter with a stalker. I knew it was going to be dark, but at first blush it looked more like a dark comedy than anything.

That is not the case. Still, what I did get—while tough to watch and unexpected—was brilliant. This is a show I highly recommend, though before you do know that it includes graphic depictions of sexual assault and deals with challenging mental health issues, trauma and abuse. It deals with these issues with nuance and care, and it handles its challenging themes without being preachy, which I appreciate. But it’s not an easy watch.

Spoilers follow.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian working at a pub in Camden. He meets a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) who seems a bit down on her luck, and so he does what any decent human being would do and shows her a small act of kindness by giving her her drink (a Diet Coke) for free. Soon, she’s spending every day at the pub, talking his ear off all shift long, making up all sorts of obvious fantasies about her busy, glamorous life. It quickly becomes apparent that she has an obsession with him, and it’s not long after that the emails begin. Hundreds a day, filled with typos and misspelled words, mostly about nothing but increasingly flirtatious.

He looks her up online and realizes she’s been convicted and imprisoned in the past for stalking. But Donny is frustratingly incapable of setting healthy boundaries, and things get out of hand. I wrote about the first half of the show already, and how his character stressed me out so much. He ends up ruining the one healthy romantic relationship he manages to build—with a trans woman named Teri (Nava Mau)—because of all the baggage he’s lugging around, though we learn that his issues go much deeper than Martha.

In the second half of the show, we discover a lot more about what motivates Donny—and what’s holding him back. In the fourth episode (out of seven) the show takes a very dark, very difficult turn. We flashback about five years to when Dunn was just getting started as a comic, trying—and failing rather badly—to get his comedy routine going in Edinburgh. There, he meets a writer named Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill) and the two hit it off. Darrien helps him turn around his comedy show almost overnight. Donny gets that first taste of what fame might be like, and he’s addicted.

When Dunn moves to London, he and Darrien reconnect and soon they’re spending an inordinate amount of time together. Darrien promises to help Donny get his writing career off the ground. And he feeds him massive amounts of drugs in the process, something Donny goes along with because he’s trying to impress his new mentor. When Darrien gives him a shot of GHB—a common date rape drug—it becomes all too apparent what’s happening. He’s being groomed, lied to and put in a terribly vulnerable position. When all of this leads to repeated sexual assault, we hope that Donny will leave. He does not. He stays in this horrifying situation, still clinging to the idea that Darrien meant what he said about him having talent, that this really is still his best shot at fame.

When he returns to his girlfriend, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin) he’s incapable of having sex. She doesn’t understand why. They ultimately break up. Years later, Donny meets Martha and while she becomes his stalker, he becomes almost equally obsessed with her. It isn’t until things really hit rock bottom that he finally reports her to the police.

In the final episodes, Donny finally melts down, revealing everything that’s happened to him while performing at a stand-up comedy finals. It’s heartbreaking, and Gadd’s performance had me in tears. (I spent a lot of time crying in the second half of the show). The monologue goes viral on YouTube, and Donny finally gets his big break, landing sold-out gigs and once again tasting that sweet, sweet adoration and fame—but the nightmare continues.

When Martha begins stalking his parents, she threatens to tell them about his online confession, so he visits them first and tells them everything. It’s yet another heartbreaking scene, not because his parents reject him, but because his father reveals that he, too, was sexually assaulted when he was just a boy. Donny tells them that he worried they’d think of him as less than a man, and his dad replies “Would you think of me as less of a man?” before revealing that he was abused by a priest.

In the end, Martha is convicted of stalking and harassment against Donny and his parents after she leaves a threatening voicemail. There is little satisfaction at her sentencing hearing, as she weeps and admits to everything. She’s left countless voicemails, and after she goes to jail, Donny becomes obsessed with listening to them, trying to make sense of them. His friends and family worry about his mental state.

In the very final scene, he’s just come from visiting Darrien, his rapist. Deeply shaken—the confrontation did not go how he thought it would—he finds himself in a bar.

Sitting there alone, he listens to Martha’s voicemails. One he’s never heard comes on and stops him in his tracks. She finally reveals why she’s given him the nickname, “Baby Reindeer.” It’s because as a young girl, she had a little stuffed reindeer and it was the only good thing in her entire life, the thing she clung to when her parents fought and took comfort in during long years of neglect. And Donny, she says, reminded her of that reindeer right down to its wee bum.

It’s a moment of terrible revelation for Donny, whose guilt over Martha’s fate comes crashing down around him. When the bartender asks him for his drink order, he realizes he didn’t bring his wallet. Sitting there in his misery, dejected and alone, the bartender tells him the drink is on him. The same exact act of kindness Donny showed Martha at the very beginning of the series.

The credits roll.

This is one of the most perfect endings of a limited TV series I can recall, not because we’re meant to think that Donny will now become this dude’s stalker, but because of how it illustrates the way cycles of abuse can perpetrate, and how almost every abuser has at one time likely been a victim first. Baby Reindeer does such a phenomenal, gut-wrenching job at examining how trauma and abuse can make people act in ways that—to the outside observer—make no sense. Donny’s inaction with Martha seems inexplicable, until we realize that so much of what he does is driven by confusion and self-hatred. “The only thing I loved more than [Teri],” he says during his impromptu monologue, “Was hating myself. And I loved her so very, very much.”

He finally realizes that so much of Martha’s mental health stems from her own past traumas and that his behaviors and hers mirror one another. Sitting there in the same seat she was in, his empathy for his once-stalker finally makes sense.

It’s been a long time since a TV show has left me this emotionally shaken in the end. I meant to write about it days ago when I finished, but every time I tried to write I couldn’t find the words. (It doesn’t help that I’ve been quite sick for a week). Very few TV shows are able to grapple with these extraordinarily difficult topics with such nuance and care. Nothing here is glamorized. It’s not being done for shock value. Baby Reindeer simply shows us how abuse and trauma create problems that can be so cyclical and intractable that it can take years—an entire lifetime even—to ever overcome the damage.

I highly recommend this series, but go in knowing it’s a tough watch, with very graphic portrayals of sexaul assault and an examination of mental health issues that can be both very funny at times, and really tragic. The show itself is beautifully shot with some truly outstanding performances from its leads. Both Gadd and Gunning deserve awards as Donny and Martha. Easily two of the finest performances I’ve seen all year. Baby Reindeer will sit with me, I think, for a very long time.