Shiva Baby – Film Review

While at a Jewish funeral service with her parents, a college student named Danielle (Rachel Sennott) has an awkward encounter with her sugar daddy and her ex-girlfriend.

More often than not, whenever you go ahead and watch a movie, you most likely do so in order to release tension and not feel like you’re suffocating. You want to escape the real world where you can have a smile put on your face and be whisked away into the story and characters if they’re interesting enough. But there are some films out there that were specifically designed to make you feel as though you’re suffocating – take the wonderfully riveting Uncut Gems for example. A movie that was, essentially, from beginning to end, and exercise in holding your breath.

Another one of these kinds of films is Emma Seligman‘s feature directorial debut Shiva Baby, which serves as a full-length adaptation of her 2018 short of the same name. From the opening sequence alone that’s sure to make you chuckle, it becomes clear that Seligman knows exactly how to make a film bursting with style and a sense of vigor. Practically nothing about Shiva Baby is by the book and that’s a wonderful thing to behold.

Had a different director been at the helm here, this film would have been tremendously different and not for the better. Seligman obviously knows how to tell this story better than anyone else seeing as how she did this story in a short film before, but oftentimes translating a short into a feature is difficult. I’m sure Seligman went through endless amounts of hurdles to get this movie off the ground but watching Shiva Baby, you wouldn’t be able to tell, because she directs this film with ease.

This film, from the moment it begins all the way to the moment it ends, essentially has you tensed up, waiting for something huge to happen. It all feels like it’s testing not only your patience as a viewer but also our main protagonist Danielle. As the movie progresses, scenes get continuously louder and more frenetic to the point where you feel like you’re also going to explode. Some will inevitably hate that idea because they want to watch a movie where they can just sort of relax, and that’s fine. But Shiva Baby is without a doubt an excellently written and directed film that really knows how to capture your attention, even if, yes, it does feel like it lacks a story.

The acting here is also superb, most notably from Rachel Sennott who portrays the lead character, Danielle. The film doesn’t really pride itself on fleshing out Danielle too much which is a shame, but there’s no denying that Sennott put her best efforts into this role and it really shows. Accompanied by her performance is stellar cinematography by Maria Rusche that almost strikes me as a horror film. This isn’t a horror film but a lot of the shots do give off that vibe which I loved.

Shiva Baby doesn’t do anything game-changing in terms of story, mainly because this film doesn’t necessarily have a grand story per se. What it is, is an excellent tension-filled scenario that just gets more and more hectic by the minute, and it’s impressively executed.