King Baby (London International Fantastic Film Festival 2024) A Royally Horny Romp

Patriarchy, masculinity, the royal establishment, British theatre duo Kit Redstone and Arran Shearing take it all on in this bizarre lo-fi period comedy. The story takes place in a desolate castle ruin in France, the time period is left ambiguous though. In this kingdom live the King, his loyal Servant… and that’s it. That is until one day the King requests a Queen, built from wood by his Servant. Both men treat this mannequin like a real person as they go about their daily ritual of a morning bath, the royal address, an afternoon hunt (which consists of the Servant dressing as a bunny rabbit while the King pretends to shoot him), a dinner consisting of jelly, followed by the King and Queen’s routine love making in bed.

King Baby’s nutty premise is only exacerbated by how real it is for the King and Servant. Think of it like a minimalist retelling of The Favourite but with the bratty verbal sparring of Joseph Losey’s The Servant. Only in King Baby both our leads are far, far gone when it comes to their mental state. Whilst never acknowledged, it’s hinted at times that this film takes place in modern day, little details like the king wearing a pair of trainers is left to us to interpret whether this is a budgetary limitation that the filmmakers quite impressively take in their stride or whether we are watching two guys in the modern world choosing to live like this. Both outcomes are equally strange. The film’s flights into comedy are less interesting though, filled with bodily fluid jokes and a consistent pace of our leads being extremely unpleasant to each other and their voiceless female counterpart. It simply didn’t work for me on that front, feeling like it was filling the film’s runtime out and adding little to the wealth of ideas that the directors are mining, indeed King Baby in general has the brief, isolated energy of a short film that may prove to be exhausting for some at an elongated 90 minutes.

What I think Redstone and Shearing succeed most in is creating a surprisingly immersive world for such a minimalist production. An empty rundown castle exterior, two actors, and a mannequin really is all they have to work with and yet they manage to never make you feel that this was supposed to be anything bigger, and yet the story quite effortlessly represents a worldwide diagnosis of a host of hot-button and age-old issues: toxic masculinity, monarchy, cultural tradition, misogyny, closeted sexuality. Furthermore the commitment from actors Neil Chinneck and Graham Dickson is to be commended, spending a good chunk of the film completely naked in the French countryside. Details like this show that Redstone and Shearing are fully devoted to making this a concentrated study of masculinity, which is clearly where the film’s strongest elements lie. 

The title itself derives from the term ‘king baby syndrome’, an unofficial mental conidition in addiction rehabilitation that carries symptoms of self-obsession, aggressive entitlement, grandiosity, greed, and most of all can lead to one struggling to comprehend the world around them because of their childlike sense of responsibility. The idea was developed from the mythic tale of Narcissus with the exact phrase itself originating from Sigmund Freud’s ‘On Narcissism’. I say all of this because I think this context is the best way to decode this film’s strange register. It’s a very playlike, static drama, which should come as no surprise given the directors’ theatre background, that operates on repetition and quite subtle mindgames. As we watch the story repeat we’re left to wonder how many times has this happened before, how long have they been here, what led these two to live in such a bizarre society and both share in this identical delusion? The framework regarding ancient Greek myth, the seeds of Freudian analysis, and the experiences of the directors open up King Baby’s most effective angles.

Despite eventually feeling like I was on this film’s wavelength I was at a constant remove from the drama, even when I really wanted to be in on it. I felt the film worked on a far more intellectual level than an emotional one, sure I understood the film and why these events were happening in bolstering the themes and ideas being the story, but never once did I feel the film, a shame for such an intimate, low-budget setting. On paper the story and the arcs of the characters add up, but for a two-handed drama I think the film needs to do more than simply make sense. A film like The Favourite, and indeed all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ work, flourishes because he puts his bizarro, almost alienlike characters in familiar settings, such as the stuffy, done to death royal period drama, and lets them disrupt their environments to wild effect. King Baby on the otherhand suffers from having both a wacky pair of characters set in an equally wacky world of their own creation, the film simply moves in a predictably wacky trajectory. It doesn’t help that the two leads are almost completely interchangeable, something that is valuable to the story but redundant as a drama, and despite being an ambitious balancing act it’s one that didn’t land entirely for me.

That being said, it’s still a unique drama that I think would absolutely please those who want a Freudian mental playground of psychological dissatisfaction that they can pick apart and hopefully feel seen by in a sick sort of way.

Jake’s Archive – King Baby