Content is the new oil. In Babystar, the debut feature from German director Joscha Bongard, the 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) is the center of both her parents’ world and their camera. Luca’s entire life has been filmed, edited, and uploaded, from her conception and birth to her sex talk with her mother (Bea Brocks) to the paid social engagements she posts herself. As a teenager, Luca has learned to wield artifice like a knife, offering effortlessly manicured answers to invasive questions from her 4.3 million TikTok followers and hitting the perfect angle when they inevitably ask for a selfie. Whether or not she’s happy, she knows how to project the sort of algorithmically grateful, brand-endorsed beatitude that landed her family a seven-figure smart home ripped from the pages of Dwell. When her parents tell her they’re thinking about having another child, though, the screen begins to crack.
Smartphones and social media are such a hurdle for filmmakers that even the most prestigious working directors often opt to avoid them completely. Technology’s pace of evolution seems to have diverted screens on screen into two major causeways: follow trends reactively and risk Boomerism before your film hits postproduction (Chef, Don’t Look Up), or deliberately swing past the bounds of futurism and into cybernetic incohesion (Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD era). For its part, Babystar finds a natural ease in the immediate.
Always seeking brand growth, Luca’s parents land her a meeting with a burgeoning tech company that wants to use the social media star as a guinea pig avatar for their new AI buddy app — users can interact with Luca and receive personalized and automated responses as if they were Facetiming with the real thing. The facsimile is both chilling and not out of step with the teenage ChatGPT relationships scoring headlines IRL. Just as compelling is watching the real Luca form a metasocial relationship with her own likeness, her ennui blurring the bounds of her avatar’s coded responses. The movie makes a few playful jabs at its own conceit, too, letting plot points play out within phone scrolls and web video windows and censoring brand names with the imprecision of an undergrad marketing major.
For all of Babystar’s insight, though, its satire often reads ham-fisted and beleaguered. Netflix docs and milkshake ducks have served us enough content-creating family downfalls to warn even the staunchest luddites of the ills of the trade, and the movie strains its tendons reaching for something new to say. When Luca’s chiseled father (Liliom Lewald) dives into a pool to save his laptop over his drowning daughter, it feels less like a provocation than the third beat in a tired SNL sketch. Her mother’s decision to calm Luca not with lullabies but an ASMR laundry list of skin creams is clever enough, but the family’s vapidity is underlined so heavily that it’s hard not to wish a joke or two was left in the edit bay. We are phone-addled, our beauty standards irreparably smeared by the algorithm, and the greatest insult to our misery is the consciousness with which we bear it. Any time spent treading a knee-deep review of the dangers of Web 2.0 feels like too much, a remedial course we’ve been taking semester after semester.
But Babystar reveals its muscle when the phones stop recording. With Luca, the 22-year-old Maja Bons proves herself the film’s most prescient vision of the screen generation. She also introduces a much-needed inoculation of nuance against an unwieldy satire. When Luca’s poise relaxes in the absence of cameras, it’s difficult to tell whether her trepidations about the baby on the way stem from fear of losing the spotlight, reflexive protection against bringing a new life under a microscope viewed by millions, or a deeper, inexplicable dysphoria. She experiments with sexuality and cruelty as if they were both sides of the same blade, her teenage impulses all the more unnerving against the collegiate control she exhibits as Luca on The Grid. There’s a genuine sense of danger as Luca pulls further from her family and headfirst into a balm of oblivion, and to see her gain agency is to watch Babystar find strength in its stride.
Joscha Bongard wears his influences without shame — Dogtooth, The Bling Ring, Thirteen — but Babystar finds an aesthetic and spiritual North Star in Lost Highway. Cinematographer Jakob Sinsel shoots Luca’s home in direct homage to Lynch’s Hot Topic masterpiece, finding shadows so thick in the house’s cloying pink hallways you worry they might drown the family. Babystar knows better than to approximate Lost Highway’s horror — what could? — but Lynch proves a fitting, if unexpected, ancestor. Like Patricia Arquette, Luca is bound by a sickly and shadowed dependency to a life on the wrong side of a camera; if Luca’s danger is more materially defined than Arquette’s, her dread is every bit as demonically abstract. In a sequence toward the end of the movie, we find Luca barreling down a dark road, her only visible limits two white lines and the reach of headlights, her direction ambiguous. Luca’s family may be a caricature, but the tail end of her teen years is as borderless and threatening as the real thing.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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