A portly young woman is attracted to a man during a chance encounter. But she mistakes his kindness for love – and starts stalking him. She crosses the line time and again, yet he forgives her. He feels sorry for her. He even humours her a little. He treats her with kid gloves, wary and fascinated in equal measure. She manipulates her way into his life, except she’s not as smooth as she imagines. This is the synopsis of a ‘captivating’ semi-autobiographical series, written and created by a comedian who stars in it. But Sumukhi Suresh’s Pushpavalli – which ran for two seasons between 2017 and 2020 – unfolds from the perspective of the woman. That’s because Pushpavalli is purely a stalker story. It has all the motifs of one: The male victim is handsome and sweet. The titular character is troubled and creepy. The supporting cast is funny and eccentric to offset the central theme. This is precisely the genre that’s weaponized by Baby Reindeer, an intricate portrait of trauma masquerading as a stalker story.
Baby Reindeer is based on creator Richard Gadd’s own experiences in his twenties. The seven-episode limited series is an affecting exercise in autofiction by Gadd, who also stars in it as the narrator and protagonist. He plays Donny Dunn, a London-based bartender and aspiring comedian whose life is thrown into disarray after he meets Martha (Jessica Gunning), a sad customer he dares to help. A friendly exchange mutates into a bond of one-sided affections; Martha gets obsessed with Donny, sending him hundreds of needy and lewd emails, shadowing him at the pub and following him home. She names him “baby reindeer” after a childhood toy. ‘No’ doesn’t exist in her vocabulary. At first, the series channels those familiar tropes. Donny is the hero and underdog by virtue of being the victim. Martha is the villain and sociopath by virtue of being the aggressor. Donny’s colleagues are rakish fools. His stand-up routines are unconventional at best. His living arrangement is quirky: He stays rent-free with the mother of his ex-girlfriend because he reminds her of her late son. And he starts dating a beautiful trans therapist named Teri (Nava Mau). Martha threatens to disrupt whatever little he’s ‘built’ for himself.
But as the series progresses, the black humour dissipates. It’s like watching a true-crime investigation of the human mind. Donny is forced to reckon with the fact that being a victim doesn’t absolve him of his hidden identity as a survivor. Martha’s stalking does to Donny what a therapy session should have – it makes him confront a trauma so deeply embalmed that he had faked its funeral. We learn that Donny was once groomed and raped by an older man, Darrien, under the guise of mentorship. It’s the equivalent of petty theft accidentally unlocking the memories of a murder. Donny reluctantly realizes that he himself is broken and flawed because of his past; there is no escaping the spotlight of shame.
His performance – as a man, a striver, an artist, a lover – comes crashing down. The mask comes off. His circumstances aren’t as quirky as they seem. His living arrangement, for instance, exploits a grieving mother. He’s a mediocre stand-up comic at best. He uses a fake identity on dating apps. He uses sex as a symptom of his virility. He lies to Teri because he is in denial about his own bisexuality. And he doesn’t shake Martha off, because in some perverse way, her behavior makes him feel morally superior – a feeling that gives him a chance to revise the power dynamics of abuse. He looks at Martha as a lesser Darrien; he thinks he can control her influence, and by extension, recalibrate the agency that Darrien took away from him.
The most remarkable thing about Baby Reindeer is that it’s a rare instance of a show’s craft – its non-linearity, callbacks and smokescreens – doubling up as its commentary. Gadd designs Donny as an artist whose self-awareness is slowly punctured by his self-loathing. Gadd never makes it seem like the show is shaped by his hindsight of processing those years. The alliterative name, Donny Dunn, hints at the comic-book duality of trauma: His is both a superhero origin story and a supervillain origin tale at once. If anything, Donny’s arc replicates the cyclical and self-sabotaging aftermath of abuse: Like grief, there is no mental exit, even when the delusions of storytelling promise otherwise. Donny goes through the classic happily-ever-after moments – his pained monologue on stage goes viral and makes him semi-famous; he confesses his truth to his parents; he moves back into his ex’s mother’s house; he even confronts his abuser – but they’re always false dawns. His unhealthy fixation with Martha keeps derailing any coming-of-age swag. It’s because he registers that Martha wasn’t a younger Darrien – she is an older Donny.
Consequently, the smokescreen goes beyond the genre of the series: Donny’s life eventually serves as a cultural simulation for Martha’s life. The initial concerns of Baby Reindeer being a female stalker drama in an age of hyper-masculinity and institutionalized patriarchy disintegrate by the midway point. The invisibilization of Martha’s perspective is, in fact, an indictment of modern victimhood and main character energy; it’s as if a woman like Martha is so simplified and dehumanized by society that even her history is reduced to the phonetics of his-story. Donny’s unraveling across seven episodes becomes a trojan horse for Martha’s journey; he is walking in her erratic footsteps without knowing it. When he finds himself on the other side of the bar in the final scene, it suddenly hits us – and him – that we’ve watched two stories in the body of one.
The enigma of Martha’s personality instantly vanishes. And the source of her trauma becomes more specific than the fat-shaming, toxic parenting, bullying or conservative upbringing that often defines textbook stalkers like Pushpavalli. The show is haunted not by the spirit of her misdeeds but by the ghosts of her suffering. In a way, Martha, too, terrorizes Donny to revise – or in her case, avenge – the normalization of her own abuse. It’s her way of reclaiming some kind of control over her surrogate pain. Unfortunately, she triggers a loaded gun in Donny; she recognizes a fellow casualty, but gets punished for the pre-existing scars of a disowned attack on her baby reindeer.
In essence, Martha was reaching out to Donny through the only medium she was conditioned to understand: The predator-prey relationship. ‘No’ didn’t exist in her vocabulary because perhaps her own No(s) always fell on deaf ears. The stuffed toy he reminds her of was her escape from the turmoil of her childhood; she embraced and cuddled with it, but also turned it into a glorified stress ball. At some level, Baby Reindeer is an anti-fairytale about two shattered souls gravitating towards each other against social odds. Hostility and violence become their love language in defiance of the silence and complicity that was once drilled into them. It’s the deconstruction of Stockholm syndrome, where time becomes the only distinguishing factor between captor and captive.
This remains the enduring beauty of Richard Gadd’s personal essay. Its cinema blurs the lines between excavation and burial, but it also perceives the courage to be selfless and empathetic. Even its bitterness is thoughtful: Donny’s voiceover goes from conspiratory to confessional. Every epiphany he has unfolds like a twist in a psychological thriller; the suspense, though, is in his thinking. As a result, Baby Reindeer functions as a dialogue between the stricken and the world that romanticizes them. Donny and Martha are consigned to the fate of those who’d rather find meaning in the fall than succumb to the pressure of a rise. He catalogs her moods and makes her the background score – the sound cues – of his life. He refuses to acknowledge the templates and resolutions of a ‘normal’ stalker story. The idea of her validates his void. That they’re trapped in a pattern of seeking kindness and misconstruing it echoes the emotional circularity of trauma, but in the shape of an infinity loop. The joke is, after all, firmly on those who look for one. A man and a woman walk into a bar – and stay there for the rest of their days.