Shiva Baby

If you’ve ever felt like your life was a house of cards held together by spit and a desperate "I’m figuring it out" smile, Shiva Baby is going to feel less like a movie and more like a targeted psychological attack. It is the cinematic equivalent of that recurring nightmare where you’re back in high school and realize you’ve forgotten your pants, only instead of being naked, you’re a bisexual college senior whose sugar daddy just walked into the same funeral reception as your parents.

I watched this for the first time on my laptop while hiding from a particularly loud thunderstorm, and the thunder was significantly less stressful than the sound of Fred Melamed eating a bagel. There is a specific kind of tension that writer-director Emma Seligman taps into here—a localized, domestic dread that rivals anything A24 puts out in the horror genre.

The Art of the Panic Attack

Most films about the "post-grad crisis" are dreamy and melancholic. They involve people staring out of rainy windows in Brooklyn. Shiva Baby rejects that. It treats Danielle’s (Rachel Sennott) aimlessness as a high-stakes thriller. Danielle is "in-between" things: she’s finishing a degree she can’t explain, she’s being subsidized by a man she met on an app, and she’s constantly being poked and prodded by a community of family friends who use "What are your plans?" as a lethal weapon.

Rachel Sennott is an absolute revelation here. Before this, I mostly knew her from her chaotic, hilarious Twitter presence, but she carries this film with a frantic, sweaty energy that is impossible to look away from. She plays Danielle with a mix of entitlement and utter fragility. When she runs into her sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrari), at the shiva, the movie doesn't just lean into the awkwardness—it weaponizes it. The arrival of Max’s "perfect" wife, Kim (Dianna Agron), and their crying baby turns the house into a pressure cooker. It’s basically Uncut Gems for girls with liberal arts degrees and boundary issues.

A Masterclass in Claustrophobia

What’s wild is that this whole thing was shot on a shoestring budget of about $250,000. For context, that’s probably the coffee budget on a Marvel set. Emma Seligman took her NYU thesis short film and expanded it into this 78-minute gauntlet of social anxiety, proving that you don’t need a massive scale to make a movie feel "big." The cinematography by Maria Rusche stays uncomfortably close to the actors' faces, making the crowded house feel like it’s shrinking with every passing minute.

The score by Ariel Marx is the secret ingredient. Instead of the plucky, upbeat music you’d expect from an indie comedy, we get these screeching, discordant strings that sound like they belong in a movie about a serial killer in the woods. It’s a brilliant choice. It validates Danielle’s internal state; to her, this shiva is a slasher movie where the killer is a well-meaning aunt asking if she’s getting enough iron.

The supporting cast is equally sharp. Polly Draper and Fred Melamed as Danielle’s parents are painfully recognizable to anyone from a tight-knit, overbearing family. They love her, they’re proud of her, and they are accidentally destroying her soul one "Have a piece of lox" at a time. Then there’s Molly Gordon as Maya, Danielle’s overachieving ex-girlfriend. The chemistry between Gordon and Sennott provides the only real oxygen in the room, even if their relationship is fraught with its own baggage.

Why It Matters Right Now

In the current landscape of "representation," Shiva Baby feels like a breath of fresh, albeit anxious, air. It doesn’t treat Danielle’s bisexuality or her sex work as "The Problem" to be solved by the third act. The conflict isn't about her identity; it's about her lack of a script. She’s living in an era where the traditional milestones of adulthood (career, house, marriage) feel increasingly out of reach or undesirable, yet she’s still being judged by those exact metrics.

The film also captures the specific "everything at once" nature of the social media age. Even though Danielle is physically trapped in a house, her digital life—the sugar baby app, the texts from Maya, the photos of Max's wife—is constantly bleeding into the room. There is no such thing as a "private" crisis anymore.

Apparently, the production was so tight that they only had sixteen days to shoot. That rushed, breathless pace is baked into the film’s DNA. You can tell this was a passion project; there’s a level of specificity in the dialogue—the way the characters talk over one another, the unsolicited career advice, the weaponized guilt—that only comes from someone who has lived through it.

This is a lean, mean, 78-minute machine that knows exactly what it wants to do and executes it with surgical precision. It’s funny in a way that makes you want to hide under your seat, and it’s dramatic in a way that feels achingly honest. If you’ve ever felt like an impostor in your own life, Shiva Baby is your new favorite horror-comedy. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most terrifying thing in the world isn’t a ghost or a monster—it’s a room full of people who think they know what’s best for you.