Dis­cov­er the deranged melo­dra­ma of this mater­nal horror

“I don’t mind telling you, Mrs Wadsworth, that I made a spe­cial effort to get this assign­ment,” Ann Gen­try (Anjanette Com­er) near the begin­ning of The Baby. ​“It was impos­si­ble not to be interested.”

Rub­ber­neck­ing view­ers who have sought out this film are like­ly to agree. Direct­ed by Ted Post in the same year that he made the hyper-mas­cu­line Dirty Har­ry sequel Mag­num Force, The Baby side­lines all its male char­ac­ters and fore­grounds its women as the pow­er play­ers in a bizarre bat­tle of wits.

This is the tale of two matri­ar­chal fam­i­lies fight­ing for cus­tody and con­trol of a baby – except that ​“Baby” (David Mooney) is an infan­tilised 21-year-old man­child, still cry­ing and crawl­ing and crap­ping his out­sized nap­py as though he were an ear­ly tod­dler. The for­mi­da­ble Mrs Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) lives with her adult daugh­ters Ger­maine (Mar­i­an­na Hill) and Alba (Suzanne Zenor), and while Mrs Wadsworth’s son might have giv­en the film its title, his lack of agency or even char­ac­ter makes him like all the men in this film, dom­i­nat­ed as they are by the strong, self-willed women around them.

The Wadsworths are ​“a pret­ty strange fam­i­ly”, liv­ing off Baby’s dis­abil­i­ty cheques, delib­er­ate­ly restrict­ing his devel­op­ment, cru­el­ly dis­ci­pling him when he shows any signs of improve­ment and even abus­ing him sex­u­al­ly. But they do not count on the deter­mi­na­tion of Ann, a social work­er new­ly assigned to Baby who recog­nis­es that his con­di­tion is in part a prod­uct of neglect and neg­a­tive rein­force­ment. Where Ann’s pre­de­ces­sors only checked in on Baby twice a year – or in one case dis­ap­peared with­out trace – Ann her­self is con­stant­ly vis­it­ing, and get­ting clos­er to the boy.

Mean­while at home, Ann mourns the loss of her archi­tect hus­band Roger in an acci­dent, and shares her grief with live-in moth­er-in-law Judith (Beat­rice Man­ley Blau). As we learn more about Ann’s own pecu­liar domes­tic set-up, the social worker’s motives regard­ing Baby start seem­ing less than entire­ly pro­fes­sion­al – although just what they are will not become clear till the very end.

“Can you think of any­thing more hor­ri­ble than being buried alive?” Ann asks a doc­tor (Tod Andrews). ​“Well that’s what’s hap­pened to this client.” Suf­fo­cat­ing home sit­u­a­tions and live buri­als are key themes in The Baby, as all these women try to make the best of the cards that fate – and the men once in their lives – have dealt them. Ann and Mrs Wadsworth may spar over Baby, their class dif­fer­ences accen­tu­at­ing the gulf between them, but real­ly they are very much alike in their ruth­less capac­i­ty both to use and to dis­card oth­ers to their own ends.

Accord­ing­ly The Baby, though mar­ket­ed as hor­ror, plays out as a deranged women’s pic­ture, its melo­dra­ma mod­u­lat­ed to the rhythms of errant mater­ni­ty. It’s impos­si­ble not to be interested.

The Baby is released by Arrow Video on High Def­i­n­i­tion Blu-ray in both 1.85:1 and 1.37:1 ver­sions on 24 September.