REVIEW: Judaism, Sexuality, and Cringe Comedy Combust in Shiva Baby

There is a lot of comedy and pathos to be mined from your early twenties. It’s a fraught time of exploration and understanding, as you’re forced to contend with not only who you are, but what you want to be as a newly minted adult. It’s a time filled with sexual foibles, mistakes, and self indulgence. At the same time, your parents and other “real” adults in your life expect you to embark on a sensibly adult track: grad school, career, marriage and babies. And there you are in the middle of it, surrounded by questions and grasping for answers: who am I? What do I want to do with the rest of my life?

All these elements are thrown into a pressure cooker in Emma Seligman’s hilariously dark debut Shiva Baby. The film follows Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young, bisexual Jewish college student on the brink of graduation. Danielle dabbles in sex work and struggles to find a use for her self-designed and opaque gender studies major she describes as “gender business”, all while being financially supported by her parents Debbie (Polly Draper) and Joel (Fred Melamed) who think she earns extra money babysitting.

Danielle attends a shiva (a Jewish funeral) with her parents for a distant family relative, where mourning takes a backseat to bagels, gossip, matchmaking, and Jewish mother one-upmanship. Danielle is accosted by family members who pinch her cheeks, exclaim she’s too skinny, and demand to know her plans for the future. It’s a stressful situation that reaches a boiling point when Danielle spots her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari) who arrives with his intimidating non-Jewish wife (Dianna Agron) and baby. Also attending the shiva is her snarky high school best friend/ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon), who has unresolved issues with Dani.

Seligman artfully condenses the American Jewish experience (the dark humor, the anxiety, the lack of boundaries) into a tight 77-minute coming of age story. It’s a deeply authentic portrayal that doesn’t veer into stereotype, and it helps that all of the performances are terrific: Sennott is mesmerizing as the unraveling Dani, and Polly Draper brings depth and humor to Debbie. The conversations have a rhythm intimately familiar to Jewish women everywhere. Sennott and Gordon have terrific chemistry as two people who know each other all too well, joking one moment and sniping at one another the next.

Seligman relishes turning up the heat and forcing Danielle to sweat out the discomfort and awkwardness of the seemingly endless shiva. The film has a jittery, claustrophobic feel that ratchets up the tension as Danielle is forced to juggle the lies she tells the people in her life. The film takes on the tone of a horror movie, only the jump scares are provided by nosy Jewish grandmas demanding to know who Danielle is dating and what her plans are.

As Danielle’s bad decisions pile up, the attentions of the shiva attendees feel suffocating and increasingly aggressive. The film’s score does a terrific job of amplifying the panic, as does the incessant crying of Max’s inconsolable baby. But Seligman never loses sight of the dark humor of the scenario, or of Danielle’s own journey. It’s an audacious and exciting debut from a new director with a clearly defined voice.

Shiva Baby is playing in select theaters and is available on demand and for digital rental now.