Luca (Maja Bons) is the child star of her family social media business, their pride and joy. When the parents decide to have another child, Luca feels betrayed and is afraid that that her families attention will be lost as it remains gripped by her performance for their account.
Babystar is a biting German satire on influencer culture – Directed by Joscha Bongard, whose previous works focused on the power of the internet and the impending threat of AI, films with a distant gaze attempting to be non-judgmental and let the characters tell you the story.
Bongard sometimes shoots from a long distance, as the family shoot their videos almost like CCTV footage – this makes the audience feel like we are watching something we should not be watching, but also something that is ultimately silly; as people roam streets/pathways with GoPros to shoot content. It seems other-worldy, and adds to the unsettling nature.
This goes hand in hand with when Luca talks to herself as an AI avatar which offers advice/consoling words in another breakdown of human liberty and free will.
The montage sequence in the build-up to the birth of the new baby is handled well; where Luca, alone on her bed watches her life caught on camera from potty training to telling her Mum she kissed a boy on a podcast video. This intrusion of the private and making it public on a platform could have been construed as science fiction only ten years ago; yet the proliferation of influencers and brands invading our personal space is more and more the current climate.
Living spaces have the feel of prisons, stagnant domains for people to sit on their phones and doom-scroll. And this domestic setting becomes more and more treacherous and unsettling – the use of staircases depicting the hierarchy of the household where father delivers his sermon from the landing to Luca at the ground floor listening (un)attentively.
Luca is a born performer, well she had to be and all the scenes of her trying on clothes or eating dinner are nothing but performative. Even her most rebellious act towards her parents is not a private moment, but something made public at a celebratory dinner.
The house is an intriguing device for the family – the sterile nature of the home and the interior spaces of studios they inhabit – oddly makes them the best version of themselves. It is when they are outside in nature that they do not know how to act correctly (or socially acceptable) from throwing a laptop into a pool or a walk by the river being nothing but an existential crisis.
In the same vein as a Yorgos Lanthimos drama from his early Greek days, this drama takes the premise of a family who have given their entire lives to social media engaging more with the online world than that of the family unit at home. There is a coldness running throughout the film which conveys the message cleverly; these people are distant and not ‘real’ by all accounts, the worry about exposure and engagement runs above what this is doing to the psychology of people.
This could be considered dystopian if only that were true, this is happening and should be considered a warning much like Ruben Ostlund’s work which focuses on human behaviour and power dynamics.
Credit also to Bongard for the sure handed ness of not glorifying the big tech companies by bleeping their name out anytime they are mentioned like a bad swear word. The opinion is they are a stain on society and should not be elevated any higher than the platform they raised themselves to.
Babystar is out on limited release from 25th September from Metis Film Distribution.
My thanks to Strike Media for the review opportunity.
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