Babystar Review
On the surface, Luca (Maja Bons) has an idyllic life – she lives in a beautiful home, with her loving parents Stella and Chris (Bea Brocks and Liliom Lewald), and has accrued boatloads of followers simply for being her. While she has millions of fans, she has no friends but her parents, and when the influencer couple decide that having another baby would be very good for their engagement, Luca feels her place in their affection is under threat. With no frame of reference for what normality is meant to look like, and no one to talk to but an AI chatbot of herself, the way she processes her feelings is… not exactly healthy.
Babystar, the narrative feature debut of German director Joscha Bongard, is a biting satire of our influencer age. It’s not subtle – we’re very much in the vein of Ruben Östlund or Kristoffer Bogli here – but neither are the times. Bongard is a fan of overblown and yet still potent visual metaphor, as in the scene where Luca tries drowning herself in the pool as her parents lie on their deckchairs right in front of her, eyes glued to their laptops. So much of the movie is about our human need for attention, the damage that comes when we aren’t getting it from where we should be, and when we look for it in places we shouldn’t.
Though the house our family lives in is enviable, the atmosphere is not. Pointedly, the action is eerily quiet in most of the scenes of them going about their daily lives, with a perky soundtrack only leaping in during the periodic cuts to their social media feeds. The isolation, contrasted with the vast numbers who click a button to say they like their content, is piercing, as are the scenes which show Luca having important birds and bees type conversation with her mum in a podcast studio. Again, none of this is subtle, but it’s effective nonetheless; Bongard’s ability to find so many interesting visual ways to underline his thesis is impressive.
Also impressive is the performance of Maja Bons. In a film where the chilly sterility is the point, she is more or less the only source of recognisable humanity. Babystar relies on close-ups of her face, as she increasingly realises that the life she’s been told so many times is perfect has a great big gaping hole in the centre, to wrest emotion from the general glossy austerity. Both Bons and Bongard walk a deft line with her character; Luca is so far detached from reality, her ways of attempting to deal with her predicament are often quite funny, and yet we never forget the tragedy of the situation she’s in. After all, she didn’t ask for any of this.
And while Babystar ultimately doesn’t seem to quite know what it wants to do with its sympathy for the plight of child influencers like Luca from a narrative perspective, on a scene-by-scene basis, the strength of Bons’ performance and of the movie’s righteous anger is more than enough to make it an engaging experience.
★★★★
Babystar will be in UK & Irish Cinemas from 25 September 2026
