Kristen Wiig Scoots Her Way Through New Thriller Disguised as Twee Rom-Com

That this premise sounds incredibly annoying is the premise of this movie; that this is exactly what life in gentrified Fort Greene is like, down to the cat being the high point, is part of what makes Nasty Baby so successful. As A.O. Scott wrote of the film in the New York Times, Nasty Baby "presents itself as something familiar. As, you might say, the kind of movie the people in it might go to see and enjoy, with a few of the usual self-conscious reservations." But instead of making that kind of movie, director Sebastián Silva—who wrote the film and plays Freddy—has created what he calls a "gentrification thriller," using a tone-and-plot twist a little more than halfway through that operates as a searing critique of that kind of movie. And of the very real, insidiously twee culture that has given rise to it. Spoilers ahead.

Though several reviewers have called the tone-and-plot twist surprising, I lean more towards disturbing—the aggressive, von Trier-esque metal backing the flashing NASTY BABY title card signals something sinister afoot, as does the somewhat heavy-handed recurrence of the Bishop, one of those neighborhood characters who frequently pops in. The Bishop is a mentally ill black man who lives down the street from Freddy and Mo, seemingly for a long time, and although everyone knows he's harmless, Freddy in particular finds his early-morning leaf blowing infuriating. What seems like a classic neighborly feud begins to escalate, with Freddy's (very well acted) tendency towards anger not helping. Polly buys a gaudy flower lamp from Bishop's stoop sale and then carelessly abandons it in the street, even though Bishop will see it; Bishop tries to grope Polly when he meets her on the sidewalk in the dark; the gentrifiers get drunk at a birthday party and set off stink bombs in Bishop's apartment (then feel temporary remorse); someone shits on Freddy and Mo's stoop while they're away meeting Mo's family. Finally, in the dark, quiet, gentrified night, things come to a head; there is blood spatter in the trailer.

Meanwhile, the pregnancy plot is there, developing alongside the Bishop narrative in its important, but still good-natured, way. (At one point Polly waits patiently with her eyes averted as Freddy jacks Mo off into a cup, and then they avert their eyes as Polly matter-of-factly assumes an upside-down pose to baste herself with the still-warm specimen—a true portrait of Gen X friendship in 2015.)

In the twee romantic comedy version of this movie, the hoped-for pregnancy might set the group up for a very 2015 happily ever after. I suppose it's possible to interpret the artificial insemination as having somehow contributed to the circumstances of the film's horrifying climax, though if that's a valid argument then the artificial insemination has to represent the casual bourgeois entitlement of the gentrifiers. Along with the flashes of metal music, the particular tenor of the characters' somewhat blithe insensitivity to their privilege—at one point, a small mob of angry upper-middle-classers starts to complain to a police officer about how Bishop is harming the neighborhood with his AM leaf blowing and scary unpredictability—seems a nod to Lars von Trier's 1998 film The Idiots. In that, a group of privileged young Danish people decides to eschew the bourgeois by occupying a house in the country. They engage in "spassing," a behavior they made up to mean accessing their "inner idiot" by acting as if they are developmentally disabled. (Spasser is an offensive term in Danish, like a worse version of spaz; they often take the performances to the public, as well, and sometimes get various benefits out of it.)

In Nasty Baby, Freddy's dumb-seeming video work is a similarly heavy-handed effort to access a simpler, inner self, taking advantage of the philosophical seriousness of its endeavor; Freddy and his friends gurgle around pretending to be babies, performing the same gestures and making the same sounds that the spoiled Danish purists do when they're "spassing." Neither group has to reconcile how its entitlement might be harmful, though they are both given opportunities to reflect on it. The Danish "idiots" never really grapple with how their actions might hurt or offend a disabled person, even when a group of disabled people visits them at their home (which is, by the way, borrowed from someone's rich uncle). In Nasty Baby, gentrified Fort Greene literally gets away with murder.

All this makes the movie sound very unfun, which it isn't; there are many funny, astute moments, just as there are in those shameful "familiar" films we watch. But what's genius about Silva's work here is the way he uses the fun to make us feel bad. Although Nasty Baby's ending doesn't necessarily reveal what will happen to the gang in the aftermath of their crime—if they'll ever have to own up to their entitlement—Silva offers us some (very gentrified Fort Greene) clues: a quiet, sunny morning; a few expensive coffees; a light, pleasant conversation with a neighbor; and down the street, real estate agents, introducing a new couple to a familiar apartment.