Baby Teeth

A mother who has suddenly lost her husband to a tragic accident goes to crazed lengths just to see her daughter smile again.

Francis (Wilcox) loves her family. In pride of place on the living room wall is her favourite picture of them all together, mother, father, and daughter, smiling for the camera. It comes as a great shock to her, then, when there’s a knock on the door and she is presented with her husband’s head, putting beyond all doubt the fact that he is dead. This information sends Francis into a dangerous tailspin and she begins to obsess about having a new picture taken, of her and her daughter, Alice (Thomas), hopeful that by the time it rolls around she’ll be able to get her to smile again.

The thing is, that Francis is a crazed nutbar, and everything she does or says is caught up in a frenzy of hysteria. She’s deliberately overbearing to Alice, and pushes her daughter in emotional and physical ways to get some sort of reaction out of her, all the time reminding her of the impending photoshoot for the new picture to go on the wall. In amongst all of this, the neighbour (O’Brien) is on the prowl outside the door in the hallway, intermittently sticking his head into Francis and Alice’s affairs in the most bizarre ways imaginable whilst offering nothing salient to the plot of the film.

Then there’s Francis herself, played by Toyhota Wilcox, in one of the more interesting casting choices that’s ever been made for screen, and by interesting I mean strange and awful. Without knowing Toyhota’s background and self-identification, it’s difficult to pinpoint just why this casting and characterisation was made, as the film doesn’t present or imply any trans rights issues or gender neutral messaging, but what we get instead is a guy in a wig and a dress, putting on a high-pitched crazy voice, and acting hysterically for the whole ten minutes. It could be that this was all done as a tongue-in-cheek joke, to help flesh out the ‘comedy’ in this self-professed comedy horror, but really it just comes off as terribly badly judged.

The feel of the film at least has some artistic merit to it, as right from the start we are led into a series of old-timey cinema cards and adverts, complete with dust on the film and crackles on the audio. This leaning towards a 70’s B-movie standard, or video nasty, allows for some leeway in the narrative structure of Baby Teeth, and director Alex David goes all out in exploiting this stylised notion for all its worth. The placing of the shots is also very in-keeping with the style and theme of the film, with things often feeling off-kilter, or at a jaunty angle, to keep the audience off balance. This also leads in to the cinematography and lighting choices which offer a soft-focus, pink-hued, filter to a lot of the scenes, lending a dream-like quality to a lot of what’s going on.

All in all, Baby Teeth gets a lot of things wrong and doesn’t present enough of a coherent narrative to entice viewers to want to come and watch it. The characterisation and performance of Francis is just too far out there to be useful in any meaningful way, and there’s not a lot of sense to the plot either. The filmmakers do, at least, have a commitment to their vision that stops Baby Teeth from languishing in the depths of the real video nasties, but only barely.