I don’t often feel like yelling at my TV, probably because I’m not big into sports, but lately I’ve had the urge to yell at Richard Gadd’s character, Donny Dunn, in his new Netflix limited series, Baby Reindeer.
This is a true story about a young man and the woman who stalks him and the many ways this ruins his life. It’s also about how he ends up being his own worst enemy.
Spoilers ahead.
Donny is stressing me out, you see. For those of you familiar with the show, you might be wondering why I mention Donny first, and not Martha, his stalker. Martha is certainly terrifying and unstable. Jessica Gunning’s portrayal of her is phenomenal. She captures such an unsettling concoction of menace and vulnerability that you can almost see why Donny wants to help her, despite knowing that she’s a convicted stalker and potentially dangerous.
Donny meets Martha at the pub he works at in Camden. She seems glum. When he asks what she’s having, she tells him she can’t afford anything, so he offers her a tea on the house. This small kindness has massive repercussions.
Soon, Martha is at his work every day, all day, spinning up elaborate fantasies about her life and all the famous people she knows and all the important things she does. She begins emailing him and then, when he frustratingly accepts her Facebook friend request, begins messaging him there, and stalking his profile, quickly growing jealous of his past girlfriends.
Things keep heating up. He’s joined a trans dating website and met a transwoman named Teri (Nava Mau) who he really hits it off with, but he’s done so under a false identity because he’s afraid to be outed. Between his delicate juggling of Martha and the web of lies he’s spun for Teri, he finds himself in free-fall.
I’m halfway through Baby Reindeer at this point, but I felt like it would be helpful to jot down my thoughts now, and then return with a follow-up when I’ve finished the show. With some shows, it’s helpful to take a little bit of a breather and process what you’ve just watched. That’s the case here. I’m trying to reconcile my frustration with Donny with the fact that he is, in fact, the victim here. I don’t want to blame the victim, but Donny’s missteps just keep piling up.
Time and time again, in the first few episodes, Donny has an opportunity to put an end to the stalking (or at least try) but chickens out. He blames his empathy for this. When Martha is sad, he feels sad for her. He’s also a struggling comedian, and the first show she attends ends up being his best, largely thanks to her. Still, he knows that he needs to stop it, but he can’t seem to muster the courage. At one point, he tells her that they can’t be together because of the age-gap. He might want children someday. She’s upset at first, but then starts sending him emails about how she’s still fertile and they could easily pop out two or three kids if they start soon.
Later, after he threatens her with the police—a surprisingly effective tactic—she begins sitting at the bus stop outside his flat (where he lives with his ex-girlfriend’s mom). She sits there all day, every day, and for a time makes catcalls at him that he ignores. But when he notices her there one night, in the middle of the night, his empathy kicks in again and he goes and drives her home, where he fake “breaks up” with her, naively feeding into her own fantasy. The moment he knew how effective the police threat would be, he should have filed a report. The moment she began sitting outside his flat, he should have called the cops. And he should have told his landlady what was happening, instead of leaving her in the dark.
Donny is stressing me out. Have I mentioned that?
What makes this show so brilliant—so far, at least—is how Donny’s own choices keep leading him down this path of no return. He could have stopped things much sooner if he’d simply been blunt. His attempts to be “nice” have only made things progressively worse. His failure to communicate—with his landlady, with the police, with his girlfriend—only push him deeper into hot water. Martha is unhinged, no doubt, but the moment Donny realized he was beings stalked by a convicted stalker who had done prison time in the past, he should have gone to the police. At the same time, I know that it’s never that simple. Being in a situation like this makes it hard to think clearly. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, fear, confusion.
This is especially true since Donny is a man being stalked by a woman, something his co-workers and boss find funny. I suspect that if Donny was a woman being stalked by a man, they would have no problem throwing him out of the pub and barring him from returning. (That isn’t to say that women have it easier—quite the contrary—only that when it comes to stalking and sexual assault, men and boys are treated differently when they’re the victims).
I know there’s more to the story, and I’m about to dive into the second half of the season to find out what happens. For now, it’s stressing me out a lot—far from the relaxing Netflix binge I should be in the middle of while I convalesce at home, sneezing and coughing and trying to stay hydrated with this blasted spring cold.
But Baby Reindeer is brilliant. I can’t look away.
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