The Baby in the Basket
I guess there is one example of a baby in a basket that is more famous than any other story. I’m of course talking about Moses in the Old Testament. How many more stories can there be? I know that my thoughts went immediately to that story in the book of Exodus. But then, when the film starts, they’re immediately talking about a wolf and how the nuns in the convent saw it one by one. This makes me skeptical and sort of abandon the idea. But still, there is a story involving nuns; it must be some religious story to be told here.
Of course, it could also technically be a nunsploitation flick, but I don’t get those kinds of vibes right away. There are atypical nuns early in the story, though. But I doubt that this will be something to start comparing to the great nunsploitation classics. You know – Images in a Convent, The Sinful Nuns of St Valentine, or Behind Convent Walls. Those kinds of movies.
Just judging from the very first few scenes, my thoughts are that it will center around how something evil will spread in the Scottish convent where the story takes place. Possibly an Antichrist or something along those lines.
And when the baby in the basket is found on the monastery steps, I get more convinced that the child is something otherworldly – or at least that it can be interpreted as such. I’m not sure if I overanalyze things, but one of the nuns is called Agnes, and that makes me think of the movie Agnes of God. Whether it’s a subtle nod to it or not is something entirely different.
What is clear, though, is that the intensity of the relationships between the nuns increases. One might say that the plot thickens – if it weren’t such a worn-out idiom. At the same time, we have a new janitor, who is not trusted by the Mother Superior, replacing the older one. That is cause for some additional tension. All the nuns don’t seem to have let go of their earthly desires – the sins of the flesh – although it is just insinuated rather than straight-on softcore nunsploitation.
Who is this child? How did it come to the remote island in the first place? Why was it dropped on the doorstep? Is it even human? There are a lot of questions to be asked. Whether we’ll get any answers is too early to tell at this point. What’s obvious, though, is that The Baby in the Basket will keep asking questions – and it’s not sure that we’ll get the answers. Or, if we do, are they the answers we want?
I think the pacing in The Baby in the Basket is a bit slow – or maybe rather uneven. At the beginning of the movie, it’s so slow that you tend to lose interest. About halfway through, it really shifts into a higher gear. Of course, we needed all the tension that came before to understand what is happening – who is giving in to the Evil and who has fallen for temptation.
In the end, it’s certainly a movie about good and evil, and I think it’s very interesting to observe how the roles are shifting. People who were very clearly on one side of the spectrum are now on the other side, and vice versa. Sins of the flesh – almost sacrilege – are no longer merely suggested. There are also scenes where there’s no doubt anymore. It never comes to softcore, but it sure intensifies.
Is The Baby in the basket a battle between good and evil, or is it a movie about insanity? A movie about blind faith, where we put our very lives in the hands of something that we don’t understand? I’m not sure if I have all the answers even when the film is over – and I really don’t need to. I find it more intriguing that we don’t necessarily know everything.
Now, I’m not a very religious man, but I’m fascinated by movies where religion has a central role, as it does here. It makes me think and sort out some of those thoughts that are impossible to label with words. That’s the good thing about movies like this. The bad thing is that while they put so much emphasis on God and the battle against evil, they seem to have forgotten about how the visual effects are portrayed.
There aren’t many scenes where such effects are present. But the few scenes in question don’t look very good. I think, in this day and age, that it should be fairly easy to create better CGI than what is present here. But that’s the only thing that I would say is truly bad about The Baby in the Basket. There are other problems, as I stated above, but the visual effects are truly awful at times.
