TL;DR: Big Baby has a creepy killer, some genuinely nasty practical gore, strong performances from Brandon Scott and Krsy Fox, and a really good setup, but the story keeps piling on ideas until the ending left me feeling more frustrated than satisfied.
Plot
Successful horror screenwriter Adam struggles for inspiration until a terrifying nightmare about a masked killer sparks an idea for his new script. As he delves deeper into the story, the line between reality and fiction begins to blur.
Big Baby Has a Really Good Idea
Well, I will say I could see what director Spider One was trying to do here, as I did not mind some of this film, despite a lot of very negative reviews, and I thought the strange, uncomfortable mixture of horror, insecurity, creative frustration, and relationship problems the film brings was decent enough.
Watching somebody obsess over criticism that they could simply ignore will probably hit you if you suffer from anxiety in particular - Adam hears a couple of idiots tearing into his work and instead of switching it off, he lets it get under his skin,where he broods over it, gets angry about it, and allows complete strangers to take up far too much space in his head. Anyone else been there before?
I also liked that Spider One gave the relationship between Adam and Kate something personal underneath all the blood and screaming, because their conversations feel like conversations between two people who actually know each other, and once the film starts getting stranger, I needed something human to hold onto.
Brandon Scott Is Excellent as Adam
Brandon Scott is easily one of the best things about Big Baby, because Adam could have become incredibly irritating because, frankly, he spends a lot of the movie behaving like a man who desperately needs to put his phone down and go outside, but Scott managed to make him much more interesting than that, and some of his later behavior is harder to watch because I actually cared about what was happening to him, and that was down to the performance.
Krsy Fox is just as important as well to the movie because Kate is the person who has to deal with Adam when his problems start affecting their relationship, where Fox plays her with a lot of patience at first, but that patience has limits, and I liked that the film allows her to become increasingly frustrated with him, just like we do watching him.
There are stretches where Big Baby is basically watching two people talk through a relationship that is starting to fall apart, and Fox also works really well opposite Scott.
Read some more horror movie content:
Big Baby Is a Great Horror Design
Then there is the actual Big Baby, and the mask is fantastic - it is stupid in exactly the right way, which is something horror movies can struggle with, where a giant person wearing a crying baby mask could easily look ridiculous, but here it has enough of a nasty quality to make the character unsettling.
The crying face is especially effective because it creates this horrible contrast between something associated with helplessness and a character who is clearly there to cause some serious damage, while the practical effects are another major plus.
Spider One doesn't seem afraid to get messy, and there are some good deaths here, where the gore has enough detail to make the violence feel unpleasant rather than just functional, and while Big Baby isn't the most complicated horror villain ever created, but visually, the character works well.
David Howard Thornton showing up as a gas-station attendant is also a nice little bonus for horror fans.
The Movie Starts Losing All Focus
Big Baby probably has enough ideas for about three films, and eventually they start getting in each other's way - there is the commentary about online criticism, the creative process, horror fandom, relationships, control, mental health, reality versus fiction, and the idea that writers give their creations power, and I could have happily watched a movie built around almost any one of those ideas, but Spider One keeps moving between them.
That makes the film increasingly difficult to pin down, as just when I was settling into one idea, another one would take over, and some of the earlier material would suddenly feel less important, while the screenplay aspect that Adam is writing also becomes increasingly distracting, and while I do understand what the film is doing with the story-within-the-story, I didn't think the material inside Adam's script was strong enough to justify the amount of attention it receives.
Some of those scenes are violent and entertaining, but they don't always feel connected to the bigger story, and I started wanting the film to get back to Adam and Kate rather than spending so much time with the fictional material, which is never a great sign.
The biggest disappointment for me though was the final act, as the movie spends so much time creating questions that I wanted the answers to be worth the wait, but, they aren't, so the film had spent all this time setting up something much more satisfying, only to arrive at an explanation that will probably leave you sitting there thinking, Oh. That's it?
A horror film can of course leave questions unanswered, but there needs to be something emotionally satisfying about where the story ends, but Big Baby doesn't quite get there.
Final Thoughts
Big Baby had a lot of potential, but unfortunately, the story gets tangled up in too many ideas and the film just ends up losing all focus - less is more, sometimes.