Spider One’s Big Baby builds real tension, then throws it away.
Big Baby Review: Spider One’s Horror Screenwriter Nightmare
Every horror writer gets asked the same question sooner or later: what exactly is wrong with you? Big Baby, the new film from writer/director Spider One, takes that question and pushes on it until something snaps. Brandon Lewis plays Adam, a successful horror screenwriter with a thin skin and a podcast problem. Two idiots with microphones say his latest film is so bad he should kill himself, and rather than switch off, Adam listens. Then he broods. Then a hulking figure in a crying baby mask starts turning up in his sleep with an axe.
Krsy Fox plays Kate, the girlfriend who tells him he is better than this, and who becomes the film’s real pressure point as Adam’s self pity curdles into something uglier. Spider One is playing in territory somewhere between In the Mouth of Madness and Stranger Than Fiction, with a mask borrowed in spirit from Happy Death Day. When it works, it works well. Hope Madden’s review looks at where the film finds its jabs, where Lewis carries it, and why the script inside the script drains away everything the rest of it earns.
It’s kind of a cross between In the Mouth of Madness and Stranger Than Fiction with the baby mask from Happy Death Day thrown in for good measure. And it’s often fun and more often compelling, again due mainly to Lewis’s committed performance.
Big Baby | Review | Hope Madden | Lightbulb Film Distribution | Released 7 September 2026 |
Is a horror film writer’s imagination creating real life carnage? Writer/director Spider One (Little Bites) asks the question in his latest, Big Baby.
Brandon Lewis is Adam, an insecure but successful horror screenwriter who opens the film by listening to two dumbasses with a podcast say his latest movie is so bad that he should kill himself.
The point is not whether the movie is bad. The point is that Adam continues to listen. Then to stew and brood, even though his girlfriend Kate (Krsy Fox) reminds him that he’s too good to be bothered by these idiots. He’s kind of being a big baby.
Cue the nightmares: a hulking brute in a crying baby mask axes Kate in half. And the only way Adam knows to deal with this nightmare…and the others…and the waking hallucinations…is to write a script about it.
Spider One takes advantage of Lewis’s genuine talent to anchor a film with a lot of insights and jabs. When you write horror, people forever wonder what’s wrong with you. Big Baby digs into this, as characters in Adam’s script show up in his life begging for theirs. He can change their fate. He has the control.
It’s kind of a cross between In the Mouth of Madness and Stranger Than Fiction with the baby mask from Happy Death Day thrown in for good measure. And it’s often fun and more often compelling, again due mainly to Lewis’s committed performance.
Fox turns in solid support in a part that generates the film’s real tension as Big Baby nudges toward toxic behavior and domestic abuse. Things get sloppy once the film focuses more deliberately on what it is that Adam’s writing.
Had the script’s story tied into the core story in any way, the final product could have been quite rich. Instead, we get a series of non sequitur murders. While the tension outside Adam’s script amps to a spectacular, yell-at-the-screen level, the parallel story within the script Adam’s writing squanders that energy.
The result is curiously unsatisfying. Even as Big Baby leaves room for sequels, we’ve lost interest in the tale it’s telling.
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