“Shiva Baby” Brims with Feverish Millennial Jewish Angst

A confession: When I first watched Emma Seligman’s debut feature, “Shiva Baby,” back in August 2020 during the virtual edition of L.A.’s OutFest, I was admittedly underwhelmed and a bit frustrated.

Perhaps my expectations were too high. The film’s bawdy premise — a bisexual, anxious Jewish college senior bumps into her high school ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy at a shiva call — pandered right into my cinematic taste and my own identity as a bisexual, anxious Jew. Seligman’s inspired pairing of young, up-and-coming talent with well-established Jewish veteran actors also offered an exciting prospect for a rollicking Semitic time.

Ultimately, however, the execution left me a bit cold and fatigued. My dissatisfaction likely stemmed from the movie’s aggressive, vaguely misanthropic unpleasantness combined with my slightly misguided projection of my own experiences growing up in an Ashkenazi Jewish community. The latter, in particular, may have been a knee-jerk reaction that I believe many encounter when witnessing their backgrounds represented on the silver screen — a primal urge to judge the accuracy and authenticity of such depictions rather than critically engaging with the story itself. My initial thinking was that “Shiva Baby” would capture a contemporary microcosm of American Judaism in all of its cultural specificities and fraught generational divides. Instead, most of it seemed to coast on familiar, surface-level tropes and clever aesthetic gestures, arguably distracting from its themes of sex, work, sex work, family and postgrad dread.

It’s with great surprise and relief, then, that my feelings about “Shiva Baby” have shifted toward the positive upon second viewing. While my reservations around its thin, somewhat undercooked plotting remain, what really clicked for me this time was Seligman’s consistently amusing script, which draws prickly comedic and dramatic tension from its acidic humor and tantalizingly stressful setup.

At first glance, Seligman’s attempts to satirize Jewish motifs through a provocative lens can read as mean-spirited and unbecoming, but a lot of the discomforting jokes are necessary to illustrate the protagonist’s carnal guilt and economic uncertainty in a space where her sexuality and ambition are endlessly prodded. Any young Jewish person who’s been forced to attend a Jewish communal gathering, whether a funeral or a wedding, bar mitzvah or shiva, is acutely aware of having to answer interrogative questions about the status of one’s aspirations and relationships, a sentiment that “Shiva Baby” delineates in excruciating detail.

Although “Shiva Baby” heightens the absurdity of these hot topics within the Jewish community, they’re made accessible thanks to Seligman’s confident direction and the cast’s charismatic performances. Rachel Sennott, who plays the eponymous “shiva baby” Danielle, is striking in her first major lead role, aside from last year’s similarly themed “Tahara.” With an extensive background in performing stand-up, Sennott brings a layer of gumption and wit to her character’s neurosis around self-fulfillment, dialing into her nerves through barely contained winces, trigger-happy snark and impulsive decision-making. She also benefits from having played this role for Seligman’s short film of the same name and premise, which Seligman crafted in 2018 as a thesis on her experiences as a bisexual Jew who moonlighted as a sex worker while in college. This personal touch adds an admirable coat of honesty to Danielle’s antsy exterior, and by expanding her short into a feature, Seligman builds upon an already solid narrative foundation.

Squirms are almost immediately induced from the film’s very risqué opening passage, where Danielle engages in vigorous sex with her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari, “Madoff”) at his vacant SoHo bachelor pad. Max is under the impression that he’s helping fund Danielle’s law school tuition. Little does he know that Danielle is an individualized study major, still undecided about her future and aimless in her career goals. And little does she know that Max is actually married to a successful shiksa entrepreneur named Kim (an immaculately icy Dianna Agron, “Glee”) and father to a noisy toddler.

Their mutual deceptions come to a collision when the two see each other at a shiva for Danielle’s distant relative, a coincidence rendered even more awkward by the appearance of Danielle’s bitter ex Maya (an exceptionally smarmy Molly Gordon, “Booksmart”). Top all the serendipity off with some nosy inquisitions from Danielle’s bumbling father (Fred Melamed, “A Serious Man”) and domineering mother (Polly Draper, “Thirtysomething”), and you’ve got a Molotov cocktail of second-hand embarrassment waiting to explode.

For a film as explicitly Jewish as this one, pointed quips about digestion problems, matchmaking and gossip-hungry moms are expected and delivered, but the true Jewishness of “Shiva Baby” lies within Danielle’s emotionally turbulent trajectory. A classic example of a schlimazel (a chronically unlucky person), Danielle ping-pongs around the house of mourning and builds a series of psychological mousetraps of her own doing. She tries wheedling her way out of uncomfortable conversations with her parents, lovers and a peripheral storm of prying guests. She eats bagels and lox to quell her worries, despite losing her appetite from her mother’s cutting comments about her weight. She takes a topless selfie in the bathroom to send to Max, only to leave her phone there after knocking on the door sends her in an erratic hurry (oddly, the mirrors are exposed in the film, even though they’re traditionally supposed to be covered during a mourning period, but that’s neither here nor there).

The true Jewishness of “Shiva Baby” lies within Danielle’s emotionally turbulent trajectory.

As the quietly intense mayhem escalates, Seligman amplifies Danielle’s regressive, infantilized behavior with enough suspense to keep the story chugging along at a brisk 77 minutes, juxtaposing busy, overlapping sound design with Ariel Marx’s menacing, string-heavy score and Maria Rusche’s claustrophobic, unsettling camerawork.

Although these elements strengthen the increasingly unfortunate set of circumstances, they occasionally seem like a crutch. For all of its formal flexing and conceptual attractiveness, “Shiva Baby” does feel somewhat indebted to more well-developed psychological thrillers like Trey Edward Schults’s “Krisha,” another brief, gnawing film that follows a woman beset with insecurity as she navigates an unwelcoming domestic environment. There are flickers, too, of the Safdie Brothers’ “Uncut Gems” and Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”, particularly during one nightmarish stylized sequence where Danielle’s fears manifest and carry an almost hallucinatory quality. Influences aside, it would be unfair to compare the merit of creative visions between writer-directors at different stages in their careers.

But even then, “Shiva Baby” still falters when trying to justify its single-location setting. There is, for example, no clear reason for Danielle to stay at the shiva for as long as she does. One could surmise that it’s simply a guilt complex that confines her, a desperate need to prove that she can withstand whatever conflicts are thrown her way, or a sadistic gravitation toward chaos, but the absence of a concrete explanation for her perseverance doesn’t really make for the most compelling drama.

On top of that, the personal strains between Danielle and Maya aren’t quite as fleshed out as they should be. Though Sennott and Gordon share incredible chemistry and exchange some wicked verbal spars, the animosity and unresolved issues undermining their dynamic are vaguely defined, so much so that when a romantic twist between the two occurs late in the film, the scene feels abrupt and forced. Character continuity, or lack thereof, is a recurring weakness throughout “Shiva Baby” that sometimes makes it difficult to buy into the motivations that lead from one development to the next.

Imperfect as it may be, though, “Shiva Baby” is a competently made, frequently funny, and promising start for both Seligman and Sennott. While it certainly could have used a bit more narrative meat on its bones to further ground its material, “Shiva Baby” deftly confronts the grief of not having everything figured out when you feel like you’re supposed to, a theme that’s as indicative of millennial malaise as it is of Jewish guilt. The title’s astute play on words speaks to this juncture, with “shiva” exemplifying a constant reminder of our mortality and “baby” representing our inner child crying out for guidance, attention and love. Toward the end of the film, there’s a moment that synthesizes these two labels, when Max’s infant wails in the middle of Mourner’s Kaddish. The camera lingers on Danielle’s terrified visage, capturing a reaction of existential nausea that can only be summarized by two words: Oy vey.

Sam Rosenberg, a University of Michigan alumnus, is a screenwriter and freelance writer.