As soon as I dialed into one of the many conversations that was happening around me in theater three of the Lamar Street Alamo Drafthouse, I knew I was in the right place. Waiting for my first screening of South By 2025 to start, I heard one festival goer ask a few others what brought them to the fest. They responded that one of their children was celebrating his impending college graduation. The family celebrated graduations by gathering for an event of the graduate’s choice. This child studied film in college, so his pick was for the family to attend the festival together.
That brief description of family joy and celebration stood in stark contrast to the movie we were all there to see. After quickly swinging by the Austin Convention Center to pick up my fest badge, I made my way to Alamo for the world premiere of the documentary Baby Doe. The film tells the heartbreaking story of Gail Ritchey, a woman who was arrested for murder when advances in DNA technology linked her to a dead baby left in the woods three decades earlier.
Gail claims that the 1993 pregnancy resulted in stillbirth, and that she was so terrified of being discovered to have been pregnant out of wedlock that she panicked and left the baby in the woods without telling anyone.
Baby Doe explores through the Ritchey case the phenomenon of a dissociative disorder brought on by pregnancy denial. Basically, when the fact of a pregnancy is too troubling to confront because of personal circumstances, the person can trick themselves into forgetting they are pregnant. As the documentary details, this is more common than the average person might suspect. Director Jessica Earnshaw started this project with another subject in similar circumstances. When that woman’s lawyer told Earnshaw about Gail’s story, the director switched her focus to Gail and her family.
Some of the cast and crew of Baby Doe (photo by the author)
It's never stated outright in Baby Doe, but conservative evangelical culture is the real culprit. Ritchey grew up in a conservative rural Ohio community, and her father, who has since died, is remembered by Gail as emotionally distant and morally rigid. There is a devastating sequence within Baby Doe where Gail’s defense attorneys ask her about the disconnect between her believing that having sex before marriage is a sin, but in participating in that behavior anyway. You can see the cognitive dissonance wash over her face, and it subsequently makes her fall apart emotionally.
She also relates that, because her boyfriend at the time – who Gail ended up marrying and having two children with – couldn’t express his love for her in any other way, it was permissible for him to have premarital sex, but that it was a sin for her to do the same. Purity culture – an insidious offshoot of religious patriarchy in which women carry all the blame for sexually “tempting” the men in their lives – practically non-existent sex education, and the belief that a Magic Invisible Sky Wizard cares deeply about what his creations do with their genitals all combine to create a situation that is as tragic as it is understandable, as long as you lead with empathy.
How could Gail’s story have turned out differently if she had felt she could go to her family with an unplanned pregnancy and would receive understanding and compassion instead of judgement and scorn? What would have happened if the word abortion wasn’t akin to evil in this community? As abortions become more and more restricted in the US – the anti-choice zealots in control of the country have their sights set on a nation-wide ban before moving on to outlawing most forms of birth control – we’ll likely see more stories like Gail’s instead of fewer, and it has nothing to do with the moral failings of the women involved, despite what the odious judge who sentences Gail to prison would have us believe.
My second screening of day one was another world premiere, a wild experiment with the eyebrow raising title The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick. I call director Pete Ohs’s latest film an experiment because of his idiosyncratic method for making it. The entire crew consisted of Ohs and his four principal actors. They had a little over a week to shoot their fever-dream of a movie. Each day, the director and his cast would write three scenes in the morning. They would then shoot those three scenes in the afternoon. The next day, they would take what worked best the day before and build on it to write three additional scenes.
That has to be an exhilarating (and terrifying) way to shoot a movie. The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick focuses on Yvonne, who has suffered a personal tragedy involving her dog. She calls a college friend, Camille, in a distraught panic. Camille tells Yvonne to leave the city and come “down here” to rest and recuperate. What Camille fails to mention is that she has two men living with her. One is her real estate agent – Camille helps him with interior design and decorating on his other properties – and his romantic partner.
Some of the cast and crew of The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick (photo by the author)
It's best to leave it there, as most of the fun of True Beauty is in buying the ticket and taking the increasingly bonkers ride. Things really get wild when Yvonne discovers, as you might guess from the title, a tick latched on to the backside of one of her shoulders. It’s all a play on self-care, minus the more insidious capitalist, scammy (but I repeat myself) nature of that industry. The film’s score, by Isabella Summers, mimics small animals creeping and crawling in the dark, just out of eyesight. Zoë Chao stars as Yvonne, and she delivers a believable low-grade anxiety that spirals as the effects of the tick bite become more distressing. Chao was the main draw for me here after absolutely swooning for her performance in the 2023 SXSW entry If You Were the Last, costarring Anthony Mackie.
Zoë Chao mixing with the hoi polloi (photo by the author)
Most of the WTFery present in True Beauty comes from the two male leads, James Cusati-Moyer and Jeremy O. Harris, behaving strangely, whether it’s via the disgusting meals one prepares for the group or the absolute self-help nonsense spouted by both. (The satirical nature of the picture comes into focus early with a Baz Luhrmann quote presented as self-help gospel.) Knowing where things eventually end up might take some of the bite out of a second or third screening of The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, but the first time through is a perplexing, disquieting experience.