With pregnancy comes changes to the body that can make a person feel suddenly foreign to themselves. For Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), the expecting protagonist of Alain Robak’s gnarly Baby Blood (1990), that’s an understatement. Early in the film, her abusive circus-leader husband (Christian Sinnige) ships in a leopard from Africa that, unbeknownst to its new owner, currently hosts a serpentine parasite the film’s prologue tells us is ancient and, after feeding on enough blood, will one day become Earth’s dominant species. Mere hours after the leopard’s arrival does the parasite escape — a move that will leave all traces of its host looking like a just-detonated watermelon — and enter the body of a sleeping Yanka.
Yanka, upon waking, is immediately presented a choice by a parasite that in the English dub of Baby Blood sounds like a snake in a Saturday-morning cartoon (courtesy of, surprisingly, Gary Oldman) and in its original French a possessed child. (In either case, the parasite’s words hit Yanka like an internal monologue she can’t tune out no matter how hard she tries.) Either she starts regularly killing people so that this new freeloader has plenty of blood on which to steadily feast, or she doesn’t — a decision the parasite promises will only lead to her getting ripped open so that it can inhabit someone more willing to do its bidding.
Not wanting to get ripped open, Yanka understandably goes the first route. Her reluctance, though, is soon stamped out by what comes to seem like a kind of bodily Stockholm Syndrome. She seems to start taking pleasure in the risk-taking that comes with leading a man somewhere, her long-lashed eyes and alluring front-tooth gap flirtatious boons, and then slashing him before he can fathom what has happened. (Yanka’s husband, by necessity, is among the first to go before she starts her lethal, aimless trek across France man-eating.) The implication is that, in a previous life where she had no autonomy, her stifling enforced by happy fists, there’s a thrill to be coveted in an existence where she becomes the one to have power over others. (Never mind if the reason for that is contingent on yet another person — or, more accurately, thing — ultimately dictating what she can and can’t do.) When the parasite confesses disappointment when one victim gets away right when Yanka was about to strike, she agrees that she’s disappointed, too.
Emmanuelle Escourrou in Baby Blood.
Though there naturally comes flushes of frustration and open threats to her invader, Yanka seems to look at the parasite as a friend, something never better illustrated in the film than in a strangely touching moment where the parasite, its voice suddenly softening, confesses to Yanka’s sympathetic ears that it often finds itself unhappy, disposed to wondering self-pityingly whether she even likes it. The nerve!
Robak co-wrote Baby Blood with Serge Cukier; they leave open the possibility that this all is just a delusion imagined by a woman pushed to her brink. You’re most prone to that line of thinking when late in the movie, Yanka approaches multiple people covered in what could reasonably be said to be bucketfuls of blood and they don’t seem to notice anything off about her except for that her long hair could stand to use a wash. (They’d never say as much to her face, though.)
Baby Blood is luridly compelling whether what’s happening in it is real. Though the narrative unrolls with the kind of episodicness that can sometimes make it feel choppy, it has an enthralling anchor in the equal parts sympathetic and scary Escourrou and an always-commanding sense of tone from Robak. The even-handed gusto with which he approaches squeamish set pieces and compassion for its complicated lead character makes Baby Blood pregnancy horror that delivers.
Peterson Reviews 