The Baby in the Basket
Directed by Andy Crane and Nathan Shepka
Written by Tom Jolliffe and Nathan Shepka
Starring Amber Doig-Thorne, Michaela Longden, Maryam d’Abo, and Paul Barber
Unrated (UK-18)
Runtime: 1 hour and 40 minutes
Available on DVD in the UK and for digital download in the US and UK February 17

by Samantha McLaren, Staff Writer

As World War II rages in Europe, a gaggle of nuns on an isolated Scottish island face off against the infant antichrist dropped on their doorstep. It’s a great premise for a slice of spooky nunsploitation hysteria, but, despite the ambitious attempt, directors Andy Crane and Nathan Shepka’s The Baby in the Basket can’t quite deliver on this promise.

Things get off to a rough start with a misjudged and ultimately pointless scene involving a nun being chased through the grounds of the monastery by a supposedly vicious wolf. Undercutting the tension more than a little is the obvious delight of the dog standing in for the predator, which no amount of screaming or dramatic music can mask. It’s a real shame that this underwhelming scare is the first we get in a film that otherwise pulls off some decent kills and special effects on a presumably scant budget, leaving the viewer wondering why it wasn’t cut to streamline the slightly drawn-out runtime.

Perhaps Shepka, who also edited The Baby in the Basket and co-wrote the script with Tom Jolliffe, realized that the scene that follows—a prolonged conversation between his character, Daniel, and veteran caretaker Amos (The Full Monty’s Paul Barber)—would be an even less engaging opening. This late-night chat does serve to establish the wartime setting and hint at Daniel’s hang-ups about fighting, but it’s all information that could have been peppered through other scenes.

Almost seven minutes in, The Baby in the Basket truly gets underway, and it’s here that the real star of the show—the location—gets a chance to shine. Every scene shot within the hallways and worship spaces of the monastery comes across as lush and expensive, all old stone and drafty-looking windows, flooded with chilly daylight and bathed in flickering orange candlelight in turns. More could have been done with the dark corners and hiding places of the space; it’s easy to imagine a more nerve-shredding version of this movie where the eye hunts for crazed nuns in every shadow. But what we get looks good, with a noticeable effort made to dress even the less eye-catching spaces—kitchens, bedrooms, and the like—with period-accurate props.

The same attention to detail isn’t always true for the costuming and styling, but with half the cast clad in habits, this distraction rarely rears its head. The nuns themselves are well realized, from the intense Agnes (Amber Doig-Thorne) to the belligerent and blatantly unbelieving Eleanor (Michaela Longden). Their similar features and identical outfits can make the convent tricky to tell apart, but the filmmakers wisely cast actors with a wide range of regional accents—always a pleasant surprise in British films, which can favor the South of England. Meanwhile, the prickly Mother Superior (former Bond girl Maryam d’Abo) has concerns about Daniel being trained up as Amos’s replacement, and rightly so: Daniel can’t keep it in his pants, which isn’t ideal on an island primarily populated by brides of Christ.

There’s a lot going on—so much that the titular baby doesn’t even show up until the 30-minute mark. When it finally does, we’re treated to the kind of charmingly naff prop that makes low-budget movies special, used sparingly enough that its presence is always a welcome delight.

The pint-sized prince of darkness proceeds to whisper eerie thoughts inside the nuns’ minds, driving some to murder and madness, though the tension never quite reaches a fever pitch. Plot threads feel underexplored: Amos’s weakness for the bottle and Eleanor’s lack of faith ultimately amount to very little, even with the great tempter in their midst. The war is also underutilized. There’s something to be said about feeling abandoned by God as humanity inflicts unimaginable evils upon itself only a few hundred miles away (close enough to sometimes hear the shelling, Daniel notes), but the screenwriters struggle to harvest as much horror as they could from this fertile breeding ground.

The Baby in the Basket doesn’t add a lot to the religious horror subgenre, but its strong cinematography and performances elevate it far above a lot of low-budget fare. It’s light on scares and the pace can be a little leisurely at times, but there are enough intriguing elements here to keep viewers from returning this basket to sender.

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