Shiva Baby
2020
****½
Director: Emma Seligman
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron, Jackie Hoffman, Danny Deferrari, Glynis Bell, Sondra James, Deborah Offner
Danielle, an aimless bisexual college student, attends a Jewish shiva with her parents. At the shiva, she faces numerous awkward questions about her lack of personal and professional direction, meets her ex-girlfriend, and runs into her sugar daddy, his wife, and baby. For her feature debut, Emma Seligman expands her 2018 short and creates a funny, captivating, extremely stressful, and uncomfortably claustrophobic dark comedy set in a Jewish pressure cooker. This brilliantly acted 75-minute film unravels more or less in real time.
