"Shiva Baby": Asking Difficult Questions
"Shiva Baby" has been described as an anxious person's horror film and as a feature-length panic attack — but it's still, somehow, hilarious.
Shiva Baby, Screenplay & dir. Emma Seligman (2020)
Question: What does Emma Seligman’s debut film, Shiva Baby, have in common with Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead? Answer: That they are two of the funniest horror films I’ve seen.
And just as Shaun of the Dead mixes zombies with romance with horror with action with comedy, Shiva Baby has you constantly wondering what kind of film it is. It’s inarguably a family drama, but how many laughs make a comedy, and how much tension (and how many jump-scares) make a horror? The point is that Shiva Baby is difficult to pin down.
Its plot, at least, is relatively straightforward. Shiva Baby is about a college senior, Danielle, bumping into her sugar daddy and his family at a shiva for someone she only sort of remembers. According to Seligman, she’d considered shooting the film like a rom-com. And that would’ve worked, though probably not half as well as the unsettling blend of black humour and horror Seligman ultimately chose. She’s called this the film’s “anxiety hook”. Like a hook, it keeps you wriggling on its point right until the end.
Come to think of it, Shiva Baby is less like Shaun of the Dead and, strangely, more reminiscent of Kubrick’s The Shining. Both films unsettle you in ways that are difficult to name; both twist anticipation into an acute sense of anxiety that neither film grants immediate or easy relief from; both find terror in the everyday, in places and people and events that our higher faculties insist shouldn’t be disturbing, like a child riding a tricycle or mourners eating buffet food. But let’s not stretch the similarities – and let’s certainly not let them overshadow Shiva Baby’s uniqueness.
What Shiva Baby does so well and so singularly is to lean towards various styles and genres without fully occupying them, so that whenever you think you have a handle on what the film is, or what it’s saying, something complicates the picture. For instance, the film is in one sense decidedly of Gen Z, in its casual familiarity with the world of apps and hook-ups, its never-pandering depiction of bisexuality, and its sensitive examination of the generational “FOMO” that leaves young people feeling like they are uniquely failing at life itself. However...
The postmodern posturing of Millennials and Gen Z – we’re too knowing and world-weary to believe or feel anything remotely single-entendre – is refreshingly absent, even as Shiva Baby uses self-awareness to great effect. While the humour of the film is deeply ironic, its tone is remarkably sincere. Characters feel their feelings without the distancing effect of constantly knowing that they’re feeling things and commenting on it. There’s a wonderfully funny and touching scene in which Danielle and her ex-girlfriend, Maya, argue about the new rules of online dating:
DANIELLE: “I literally replied to your fucking story –” [an Instagram thing, I think?] “– and you didn’t... you just, like saw it!”
MAYA: “You do not reply to a reply, okay? That’s psychotic behaviour!”
As funny as this is, it’s also bracingly raw and provides a strange relief – at last, you feel, after half a film of people suppressing themselves to be “polite”, here are two people saying what they truly think. And though the rules about social media and replies are decidedly contemporary, they’re just a new version of the “three-day rule” from previous generations, which before that was probably something to do with whether it was okay for “the woman to ask the man out”. Shiva Baby may have been made by a younger generation, but it will speak to their older relatives too.
It’s also refreshing that Shiva Baby rejects the knee-jerk affirmation of personal choice, which has been prominent in the culture and politics of the last few decades. Seligman has said she was keen to explore Danielle’s realisation that finding her self-worth through “sexual validation” is “not as powerful as she thinks it is”. Near the end of the Shiva Baby, Danielle echoes a common sentiment among advocates of sex work as a form of sex positivity, telling Maya, “It felt nice to, like, have power and be, like, appreciated.” Never has the filler word “like” been more accidentally telling: what she has is like power and she receives something like appreciation, but neither is quite those things.
Shiva Baby seems to be asking whether feminism is a good in and of itself, or if we should value it only to the degree that it helps women lead truly fulfilled lives. One of the possible answers Shiva Baby suggests is that feminism is a way of viewing life, rather than a way of life itself. When a nosy family member pries into her gender studies and future job prospects, Danielle snaps, “Feminism isn’t my career! It’s a lens!” This is made manifest in the fact that the two most successful young women at the shiva are living out their feminist ideals – that is, feminism has freed them to pursue the lives they want – while Danielle, feeling stuck and as if she constantly fails to measure up, isn’t studying business, or writing, or pursuing a career. Instead, she’s studying feminism itself. The lens has a lens on it, creating an infinity mirror of diminishing meaning.
The question “How empowering is sexual empowerment?” is not often asked in polite society, but Shiva Baby is a disarmingly candid film. It’s also honest enough to let each of its characters inhabit genuine ambiguity. The people here, like Shiva Baby itself, are never either/or – they are various and complicated. Danielle is sympathetic, but also a brat. Maya is charming, but cruel when she’s hurt. Danielle’s mother worries how it looks to their community to have a bisexual daughter, but there’s none of the usual homophobic venom. When Danielle complains that her mother has “zero gaydar”, her mother snaps back,
“Excuse me, kid! I lived through New York in the 80s! My gaydar is strong as a bull!”
Every scene is full of lines and moments like this that I adore. If I leave you with one takeaway about Shiva Baby, it should be this: that amid all the higher-level thesis-wrangling about feminism and autonomy, and despite the near-constant state of tension, Shiva Baby is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s also, in the end, a very hopeful film, as captured in its final moment, which I’ll leave for you to discover for yourself.
Marginalia, plur. noun:
“In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin … for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe