Shiva Baby (2021)

Shiva Baby arrives as a compact anxiety engine set almost entirely in one Brooklyn house during a shiva. Emma Seligman directs with the precision of a sommelier decanting a difficult vintage. The film deliberately centers Jewish and bisexual life, and its casting largely draws from Jewish performers and a woman director. That said, the lead actress is neither Jewish nor queer, a fact that generated criticism. The representation is intentional, but not seamless. The title refers both to Danielle and to the baby, a neat compression of the film's twin anxieties.

The emotional core belongs to Danielle's bisexuality. Her history with Maya is not subtext; it is the film's romantic and psychological hinge. Their prom memory, their flirtation, their final hand-hold carry the movie's longing. This is a woman-led, woman-directed study of sexual autonomy, maternal pressure, and the suffocating comparison between daughters. It observes rather than preaches. The feminist current is present in the mother-daughter negotiations and in Danielle's attempts to wield sex as power, then discovering the limits of that power. Seligman treats queer desire as ordinary, which is its own quiet achievement.

Other progressive markers are absent. Race is not a subject here. Climate does not enter the frame. The sugar daddy arrangement involves money and transactional intimacy, but no anti-capitalist critique follows. Food functions as an anxiety motif, not a body-positivity statement. Danielle's claustrophobia reads as social panic, not neurodivergence. History is not revised. The film's themes are embedded in cringe comedy, so the lecture energy is minimal. It prefers discomfort to sermon. The camera stays close, the score scrapes, and the social field tightens. The result is a sharp, humid, funny chamber piece that earns its social consciousness through character, not proclamation.