'Babies' Gets Brutally Panned

Have you experienced the horror that is the film Babies? Maybe you shouldn’t, writes Christine Smallwood: “Breasts are everywhere, hovering like an overwhelming weather pattern. A crisis erupts when one child won’t suck. The mother responds by grasping her nipple and dribbling milk all over the baby’s face. There is no escape, for the baby or for us; the camera is in extreme close-up, the entire screen filled by nipple, face, milk…. The film functions like a bizarre visual seminar in object relations theory. The mothers, alas, never emerge as whole persons.”