[7]

A social worker investigates a mother and her two adult daughters who take care of a 21-year-old man who wears diapers, sucks baby bottles, and sleeps in a baby crib. The family insist the man has the mental and emotional capacity of an infant, but the social worker’s not so sure. The Baby isn’t the dirty, fetishistic film I thought it would be. Director Ted Post (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Magnum Force) and writer Abe Polsky anchor the deranged tale in the social worker’s plight to rescue ‘Baby’ from his family. The whole film is engaging and unsettling, teetering between camp and sincerity, until it arrives at a climax that pushes it very well over the edge into psychological horror.