Kit Harington and Noémie Merlant in Baby Ruby (Magnet Releasing)

At the start of Baby Ruby, we are introduced to Jo, a young pregnant woman who is a hop and a skip from delivering her first child. She lives in a beautiful rustic home in the country, and makes a living as an influencer and blogger. Every moment of her life is burnished up to perfection for her online audience. That is how Jo, the perfectionist, likes it. She throws her own baby shower because a) she can plan, cook and decorate the way she wants and b) aside from her work friends and her hunk of a husband (Kit Harington), she doesn’t have close friends. But she is clearly content and excited about the pregnancy.

Then baby Ruby arrives and things do not go as planned because Ruby is, well, a baby. She cries all night, disrupts plans, is constantly needy and never satisfied. Ruby crashes into Jo’s well-constructed world, and the new mother goes from sleep-deprived, exhausted parent to something darker yet fairly commonplace. Jo shoots past postpartum depression and lands squarely into postpartum psychosis.

Writer-director Bess Wohl finds ingenious ways to chronicle Jo’s descent. A montage includes the constant picking up and putting down of Ruby in and out of her crib. In a long shot through the living room window of Jo holding and trying to comfort her child, suddenly two Jos appear and then three, all doing the same action as the sound of the crying child multiplies as well. Eventually the state of the house devolves to the point where the dog is eating pizza out of the box on an expensive couch.

When her co-worker comes by and says Jo hasn’t posted anything or given any direction to the team, Jo states she’ll get to it, and the co-worker looks at her incredulously and says, “It’s been a month!” This is our first clue that the situation is worse than it appears. For a woman who must present a pristine, you-too-can-live-my-life image, her inability to control her life or attend to her child’s needs is devastating and soul wrecking.

Eventually, Jo’s reality crumbles, and she becomes paranoid and seems to be hallucinating. Ever trying to get us into Jo’s head, Wohl doesn’t directly address what is and isn’t real. She is expert at keeping us as off balance as her protagonist and very good at getting us into her character’s head. However, she is not as successful at is surprising us once we get there. Though Jo absolutely believes her child is either a) in danger from others or b) deliberately antagonizing her, we, the audience, know that’s not the case. So, any suspense derives from what Jo will do, and not from anyone else, much less the child. Though sometimes we have trouble figuring out whether something is a hallucination or reality, ultimately, we understand it is not real. Jo, on the other hand, does not. That leaves us at a remove from her, yet we are only really privy to Jo’s perception.

Luckily, Jo is played by Noémie Merlant, who was so impressive in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Here she burrows into her character with stunning ease, allowing us to see every emotion slide across her face. Her confusion that her post-pregnancy life is markedly different and difficult to control is palpable. Her astonishment to meet a whole phalanx of mothers who are happy and put together is both amusing and heartbreaking, and her descent into postpartum psychosis is, indeed, frightening to behold. Harington and Jayne Atkinson, as her mother, lend able support in thinly drawn characters.

Ultimately though, Baby Ruby is an effective and timely examination of postpartum psychosis and a condemnation of the expectations placed on mothers. In particular, it takes on the pressures of living up to an ideal of emotional wellness and personal satisfaction that is exasperated by social media, and the crafting of the perfect version of the self, as opposed to the imperfect, messy, more honest one.