‘The Baby in the Basket’ Review: A Nunsploitation Throwback

The core concept for Andy Crane and Nathan Shepka’s The Baby in the Basket piqued my curiosity immediately. A nunsploitation film with a demonic baby wreaking havoc in an isolated nunnery. Sign me up immediately. That’s just the kind of trash I can’t seem to get enough of. The film delivers saucy nuns and a killer baby, which is what got me in the door. However, a poorly written script and shoddy execution negate anything the flick has going for it. Accordingly, the majority of the picture becomes a chore to sit through.

The setup goes like this:

The Baby in the Basket unfolds at a remote European convent. We watch as the residents of the isolated nunnery witness a series of bad omens. The unsavory incidents lead up to the arrival of a seemingly innocent baby in a bassinet. Following the infant’s arrival, the evil gradually grows stronger, luring the sisters into a series of salacious situations. Can the women of God repel the darkness they’re facing, or will they fall prey to the sinister forces afoot?

I have a lot of issues with The Baby in the Basket. Perhaps the most obvious is the complete lack of character development. The nuns are all interchangeable. It’s difficult to visually differentiate them when each is covered from head to toe. So, it’s especially important that they possess some defining personality traits. Sadly, they do not. We learn very little about the ladies at the core of the narrative, making them come across as one-note and entirely forgettable. Other than one sister establishing herself as good and another demonstrating wicked tendencies, I could barely tell them apart.

The Baby in the Basket is hindered at every turn by a shoddy script.

Compounding the aforementioned challenges, Tom Jolliffe’s script is a very slow burn. We spend an inordinate amount of time with these women during the film’s quieter moments, waiting for the tension to escalate. This prolonged calm before the storm would have been a great time to develop the core characters. Yet the opportunity is squandered.

When the flick finally hits the accelerator, the film goes from zero to 60 in record time. The home stretch is admittedly somewhat entertaining. However, the average viewer isn’t likely to stick around that long. I would have bounced before the end of the first act if I didn’t have to see the film through to write my critique. There’s nearly no effort put forth to secure audience buy-in before the onset of the finale.

The film also suffers from tonal inconsistencies. The characters play it painfully straight. Yet the subject matter is campy as hell. It’s as if screenwriter Tom Jolliffe couldn’t reconcile the silly nature of the premise with the strait-laced characters. He needed to either let the nuns loosen up a little or rein in the setup to ground the proceedings. As it stands, the two are at odds.

With religion and faith as such prominent themes, it would have been easy (and beneficial) to provide some form of commentary on one or the other. Perhaps speaking to what draws people to faith, what it means to dedicate your life to the service of others. Something. Anything. However, the subject matter is presented absent of any greater message. So, what we have is a slow-burn film with paper-thin characters, major tonal inconsistencies, and absolutely nothing to say.

The film revives the nunsploitation subgenre, but the payoff isn’t worth the time investment.

The singular selling point of The Baby in the Basket is that we get to see the nunsploitation genre revived alongside a schlocky killer baby component. I enjoyed that unlikely juxtaposition despite the picture’s inexcusably bad CGI effects. However, the eventual payoff is not nearly engaging enough to warrant sitting through the 100-minute runtime.

If you are a glutton for punishment and want to endure The Baby in the Basket, you can find it streaming on Tubi as of the publication of this post. However, I would suggest taking a pass.