Metacritic reviews

The film is a mad whirl of influencer phoniness, paranoia, imposter syndrome and parenting nightmares.

Baby Ruby is pitched somewhere between domestic melodrama, a tale of a crack-up, and paranoid thriller. Wohl and Merlant keep shifting the ground underneath Jo and the viewer, throwing us off balance.

There’s crafty playfulness to Wohl’s approach, though; dialog can be as killer as Jo’s darkest impulses, and some scenes are drop-dead funny even if they’re about wanting to drop-kick Baby out of your life.

Baby Ruby makes a valuable contribution to the emerging cinematic literature on the unspoken realities of women’s lived experience — with style, disarming honesty, and a steady and intelligent hand.

Despite some unevenness, Baby Ruby is a fervently uncomfortable and aesthetically compelling depiction of new motherhood, an unsettling horror exploration buoyed by strange imagery and a no-holds-barred lead performance from Noémie Merlant.

In its empathy-driven terror and ghoulish wit — including the Chekhov’s-gun rule hilariously applied to the placenta — “Baby Ruby” won’t be for everyone, although it only ever feels steeped in the honesty of experience, which, according to the press materials, was partly Wohl’s own.

Evocative and appropriately aggravating as Baby Ruby is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of this condition into full-blown genre tensions and terrors yields mixed rewards.

As moody and messy as its eponym, Baby Ruby aspires to demonstrate how postpartum psychosis can feel like a horror movie. It just fails to make the condition feel like a particularly convincing or cohesive horror movie.

The film’s depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.

Baby Ruby operates at a high-pitched melodrama-horror level, and the constant frenzy becomes exhausting. The film's nerves become so frayed there's almost no feeling left in them; the terror is monotonous and repetitive.