Film Review - Chuck Chuck Baby (2024)

Chuck Chuck Baby is a pensive film about the figurative prisons we make for ourselves. Liberation and self-acceptance can be hard to come by when we feel stuck with the cards life has dealt us. Janis Pugh’s debut feature is often uneven, but its commitment to championing these sentiments in the face of domestic entrapment makes it an engrossing drama with a strong heart at its core.

In a rundown Welsh town, a stone’s throw away from Liverpool, lives Helen (Louise Breely). If ever there was someone beaten down by life it’s her. She dutifully cares for her ill mother-in-law Gwen (Sorcha Cusack), while living in the same house as her ex-husband Gary (Celyn Jones), his much younger girlfriend and their baby. They’re a constant reminder of the nuclear family Helen wanted but couldn’t have. Her job at the local chicken factory is long and monotonous. Despite the efforts of her rambunctious co-workers to make the time go by, Helen feels stuck in a life destined to uneventfully trundle along.

A chance at something new arrives with the re-emergence of her childhood crush, Joanne (Annabel Scholey). A rebel type who grew up in a troubled household, Helen idolised Joanne despite the two never really speaking. The two see kindred spirits in each other and something begins to blossom between them, despite the inner demons each are confronting. As their arcs intertwine and the narrative plays out, the characters sing along to the playing of songs of the 60s and 70s, such as “Dirty Old Town” and “Going Out of My Mind”.

The choice to hybridise it with the musical genre, albeit as more of a form of accompaniment than spectacularization, gives the film a unique sense of introspect. Despite the popping colours of the cinematography, everyday oppression lingers around these characters. Whether from ungrateful or abusive households, mental health battles of self-loathing, or just the abject poverty of the setting the characters live in, everyone, even the slothful and bad-tempered Gary, is in some way wallowing in incompleteness. The songs played are outlets for the characters to vent and give us a glimpse of what’s bubbling underneath their surfaces of supposed contentment.

Space indirectly highlights this oppression, while also hinting at how it can be conquered through love of the self and others. The vast openness of the countryside initially invokes feelings of emptiness and pointlessness. But, when Helen, Joanne, and some of Helen’s co-workers travel up the hills for a getaway, all that open space suddenly evokes possibilities and potential. Tying the location shooting together with local idioms in the dialogue creates an authenticity to the world the film creates, detailing both the perils of domestic hardship and the temptation of nostalgia.

This mix of aesthetic and content can create tonal jarring throughout the picture, particularly the deeper we go into the narrative. As Helen begins to recapture some of the joviality of her youth, her moments of jubilation are sometimes directly followed by moments of Joanne suffering in public or in silence, including one especially uncomfortable moment where Gary and the neighbours all gang up on her for being a victim of her father’s abuse. It perhaps could’ve done with some shifting around of scenes in order to soften the feelings of whiplash between the moments of singing and the moments of darkness.

What keeps Chuck Chuck Baby afloat is its investment in its central characters and theme. While some of the performances of the antagonistic characters border on caricaturistic at times, Scholey and Brealey have great chemistry together. Their commitment to subdued performances that are barely keeping a lid on the things that terrify and depress them creates a wealth of empathy for both women. Cusack serves as a compelling mentor figure to Helen, offering perspective and sympathy to help her along on her arc of change. It’s in dynamics such as theirs that the film’s key strengths – namely its belief in solidarity and compassion – crystalise in the best ways.

While rough around the edges, Chuck Chuck Baby proves a promising start to writer-director Janis Pugh’s feature film career. It’s colourful, deeply engaged with its characters, and celebrates what life can be like when one is able to conquer their woes, regrets and fears. That it is in service to a new queer romance, a subgenre that is still relatively infrequent today, makes it all the more admirable.