The Chilean director Sebastián Silva made a striking debut with his black comedy The Maid, then went manically astray with the tourists-in-trouble diptych Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and Magic Magic. Nasty Baby finds him on firmer ground, up to a point. Silva himself and Tunde Adebimpe (from the band TV on the Radio) play a gay couple who agree to help a friend (Kristen Wiig) get pregnant by artificial insemination. The film, which is set in New York, starts as an amiably loose-limbed improv comedy of bohemian pretensions: Silva’s character is an artist whose latest project has adults playing babies. At the end, however, Nasty Baby veers into an incongruously brutal register and the shift feels utterly jarring – as was no doubt intended. But this is one of those awkward films that depicts complacent characters while itself looking complacent, and Silva never quite seems in control of his volatile material.
