Modern social media is modelled after slot machines. If we are the viewers, yanking the lever as if it’s an extension of ourselves, Joscha Bongard’s Babystar is the scathing, postmodern picture into the existences of its miscellaneous fruits and lucky sevens that pirouette on our every pull, unable to escape the dizzying cycle they’ve been born into. Basked in sharp, disturbingly familiar commentary on the commodification of intimacy in an economy that speaks only in retention and engagement, this Lanthi-most internet drama is one to watch, even when it swings a touch too far.
The film documents the fictional “our_bright_life” YouTube family and their daughter Luca (Maja Bons), dragged into this eponymous inferno of child stardom from before she was even born (her birth video is even uploaded on the channel) and projected as the Sommer family’s mascot more than a daughter. Her parents (Bea Brocks, Liliom Lewald) are loving in the same way a TikTok creator’s weekly round-up issues praise, and Luca embarks on a chase for any significance or connection with her distractingly quantitative and brand-infatuated family, alongside her socials team and four million fans.
It’s a striking deconstruction of insidious family influencers that could only be made today, as the YouTube babies develop into teenagers with a rupturing conscience regarding their patterned mistreatment, and life subjected to the lens. The kidfluencers aren’t blind tools of the trade anymore, and time in the limelight has raised some serious questions of ethics. Incidentally, anyone who found a second home in the life of some utopian family channel in the American suburbs, churning out Toys R Us raids before more stock could even be made, has come to realise that the childhood they observed through their feeds and iPad screens was hardly anything beyond a clickbait farce. Babystar unboxes that frightening reality with triangulated empathy, scorn and the appropriate vigilance.
While the measured surrealism of influences like Östlund, Lanthimos and Lynch is more obviously embroidered onto Bongard’s direction than a sponsor is into a vlog (relatedly, the intro is the most passionately Severance thing since its second season went off the air), his own style permeates the screen in droves. Luca’s life is witnessed from panther-like angles that question whether such a thing as ‘off-camera’ can exist, choosing to shoot from ceiling corners and sneaky apertures while the edit stitches together montages or outfit switches like an attention-juggling TikTok’s hypnotising clap or jump transitions.
His obsession with two-tone negative space blends the beautiful with the bleak, intensifying the existential hell of a life where on and off don’t exist in such a simple binary. Frequent collaborator Jonas Vogler brings a deft score that understands the importance of a sustained silence, all to create an internet satire which never feels as fake as the vaingloriously attention-sapping influencer unit at its forefront.
But perhaps Babystar‘s most remarkably novel directorial move is the brutally implicated opinion of its anti-capitalisms. Any brand – whether it be the social media used (and through which large chunks of the story are watched) or the name of a hotel – is suppressed with a deafening, unmissable blur. While it may not be challenging to deduce the pixelated seven-letter word aligned neatly alongside a rectangular red play button logo (nor will it be challenging to acknowledge the meta irony link-embedding this oh-so-mysterious website here), this commitment to Babystar‘s relentless frustration with the digital age is able to palpably commentate without feeling one-sided or preaching, and it’s all the better for it.
Babystar‘s betting of the ranch on the researched tenacity of its internet hypervigilance can only get Bongard’s first feature-length drama so far before it becomes old, though. The script is a touch too Dogtooth – fit with the barking families, sterile interiors (more Umbrella Corporation lab than influencer house) and the beautifully creepy solemnity of Eastern European surrealism – in a way that distracts from what is otherwise infallibly real. Bons gives a great performance as the commodified icon who knows her own AI chatbot better she knows herself, but too much momentum is burned on hammering down her obvious discontent to where she abandons the home entirely, leaving a third act too flat to warrant its attempt at raising the stakes.
Bongard’s intense knowledge on everything social media and family channels can also be hard to place. Nothing points to Babystar taking place anywhere but today, filmed in 2020s Germany inside a house that merges Parasite‘s sprawling corridors of class commentary with the Team Ten influencer mansion, yet its meta vertical content is often prochronistically dated in the early noughties. While its ability to make remarkable replicants out of modern content is impressive (particularly so in an age where most movie phones still don’t look like our real phones), these minor inaccuracies collate into something much larger and disproportionately dismantling.
Much like the content it chooses to unpack with appropriate fury, Babystar‘s subject matter might be too ephemeral for the amelioratory languid satire it goes on to birth. Still, those historical, structural and tonal lapses don’t destroy the crucial media satire so central for the first generation finding more solidarity in a phone than a friend, or – much worse – the chatbots (of herself) Luca comes to confer with in a family that has emotionally abandoned her. On Bongard’s first feature-length film, he’s carved out an appropriate corner to onlook the digitalism of our zeitgeist with a trained eye. It’s not perfect, and arguably bites too deep into the hand that feeds it, but it serves as a valuable proof of potential for whatever he attacks next in our internet’s grand miasma.
3.5/5.
Babystar is available in UK cinemas now.
