Shiva Baby — Review Thread

Can do!

You don’t know Molly Gordon? Daughter of Bryan Gordon. Director of the Jennifer Connelly classic Career Opportunities.

How you think Doomsday got BFG? ... with talent??? You gotta know who to dickdown.

How does one become a social media influencer exactly?

oh my...

How do you think I got 20,000 subs?

Step 1: Be under 22
Step 2: Make some youtube and or tiktok videos where you scream at stuff or do weird dances
Step 3: Do a twitch stream where you scream at the screen while playing some zoomer video game
Step 4: Get into a feud with another influencer
Step 5: Sex Tape
Step 6: Say something racist and get cancelled
Step 7: Do a ten million subscriber special
Step 8: Celebrity boxing match
Step 9: Make a terrible movie and/or TV show
Step 10: Do something else to get cancelled again
Step 11: Do a 100 million dollar subscriber special
Step 12: Turn twenty five and age out of being an influencer

Shiva Baby(7/19/2021)
I wasn’t really sure what to make of Shiva Baby when I first heard about it, in part because it was less than 80 minutes and debuted on VOD and it wasn’t clear to me if it was a “real” movie, but it is. The film looks at a woman in her twenties of relative privilege who nonetheless moonlights as a sex worker (specifically a “sugar baby”) in order to fund a certain lifestyle. The bulk of the film concerns a very awkward Shiva she attends for what appears to be a rather distant relative who has departed in which she is surprised to learn that her “sugar daddy” is also attending alongside his wife and infant daughter. Cringe comedy ensues. The film does a good job of portraying the sheer unpleasantness of attending one of these awful over-crowded family gatherings that seemingly only exist to torture us introverts but obviously the specifics of this situation really kick things into overdrive. In some ways the film is almost too laser focused on expressing that feeling and I feel like it could have maybe benefited from a few more plot points to fill out the running time a bit. The film is adapted from a short film and at times you can kind of feel it, or perhaps it feels like an episode of a larger TV show as it kind of starts and ends rather abruptly within a central character’s life. It’s a movie that is perhaps better at coming up with an interesting setting and situation than it is at really doing something with it, but there’s enough there to make it worthwhile.
***1/2 out of Five