Babystar (Babystar)
Director – Joscha Bongard – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 12a – 98m
*****
A social media influencer family suffers upset when the teenage daughter discovers her parents plan a second child – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th
Parents and teenagers. Fraught at the best of times. More so than most for 16-year old Luca (Maja Bons) whose social media influencer mother Stella (Bea Brocks) and father Chris (Liliom Lewald) have exploited their family life on various social media channels and done very well out of it financially. Materially, the family has it all – a stylish house with a swimming pool and all and any goods they could possibly want. This applies to Luca too, but where her mother climbed up to this high social position from poverty, Luca has lived the lifestyle of the rich and famous ever since she was born. She has never known anything else. And as well as the family’s our_bright_life online channel, she herself has her own channel.
As if this situation wasn’t already a potential powder keg waiting to blow sky high in her teenage years, her parents drop a bombshell on her. How would she like a new brother or sister? Like so many only children before her, she is inevitably conflicted. Her parents’ love and attention will no longer be purely directed towards her; she will have a rival.
And what might this mean for the 16-year-old internet sensation? Will her parents switch their attention and focus to the new arrival? Will the baby usurp her to become the focus of the family’s channel?
Director Bongard, who is himself young enough to have grown up in the age of social media, and in the press blurb readily admits its profound effects upon his own life and that of many others of his generation, is clearly fascinated by the social dimensions of all this. He and his film clearly side with the teenager as she grapples with a combination of issues that affect any child about to become a sibling along with unique situations springing out of her high profile, influencer status.
There are precedents cinematic and otherwise: just think of Robin Wright-Penn in The Congress (Ari Folman, 2013) who sells her digitised image to Hollywood in a lucrative one-off deal so that the Studios can make whatever movies they want without her having to do anything else. It’s the myth of Faust.
Luca feels similar; at sixteen, she is an attractive product who can potentially command large sums of money for herself. Yet her situation is different: where the heroine of The Congress is effectively selling herself of her own volition, albeit on the advice of her agent, in a Faustian pact, Luca has, to all intents and purposes, been packaged and sold as a brand since birth, curated by her parents.
She can’t sell herself to the Devil – at least, not for the first time, because that deal was done when she was born – but she has been placed, in some sense, in a strong, capitalist bargaining position where her brand – i.e. herself – has a proven track record. So what is she to do? And what will be the effect upon her humanity?
Bongard’s approach is very much that of the slow-paced social drama: he’s not playing any of this for laughs or thrills, his interest lies rather in the social phenomenon he is exploring. You might describe the film as a form of philosophical enquiry. (If that sounds dull, all I can say is that the whole thing had me on the edge of my seat, not in the sense of a thriller, more of a compelling social enquiry.) That approach means it gives the actors something very meaty to get their teeth into.
The teenage Bons as the teenage Luca is also tackling the issue of growing up, puberty, and the way that time of our lives makes us question everything our parents have taught us, and rebel. This makes her different from the protagonists of Blue Film (Elliot Tuttle , 2025) or Cam (Daniel Goldhaber, 2018), sex cam internet performers who as adults know exactly what they’re doing, or the various media-aware adults who populate Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983).
If you accept the contemporary British view that as a 16-year-old Luca is a child, not an adult, that draws a very different line between Babystar and those other films. The one film I can think of that explores loosely similar ground is Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, 2014) which includes Hollywood child stars among its cast of freakish celebrity characters. Director Bongard is, however, clearly his own man blazing a unique, exploratory trail in cinema. This may not have all or indeed any of the answers, but it’s certainly asking some of the right questions. Searing, essential stuff.
Babystar is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 25th.
In German with English subtitles.
Trailer: