“Big Baby” (2025) is writer, director and co-production designer Spider One’s latest film and is a marked improvement compared to his prior film, “Little Bites” (2024). Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott) gets paid to do what he loves, write horror movies, has a great relationship with his girlfriend, Kate (Krsy Fox), and an enduring friendship with his former college writing partner, James (Torio Van Grol), but Adam does not act like it. Lately he has been lashing out at all criticism, real or perceived, when he gets an idea for a slasher franchise featuring a killer out for revenge against everyone who hurt him. When Adam starts acting erratically, it is hard to tell if he is deep in psychosis or telling the truth that his creation is real. The one hour forty-minute film is two thirds perfect before losing all momentum in the final act. It is still worth a watch for feeling so grounded in creating authentic characters, realistic relationship dynamics and genuine psychological horror before surrendering to the slasher genre with vaguely supernatural elements.
There were a lot of elements in “Big Baby” that could have tripped the movie up, and it never happened so kudos to Spider One for making a film where all the characters are innately sympathetic and flawed without excuses. Scott and Krsy Fox nail the role, and Spider One, cinematographer Andy Patch and co-production designer Dakota Fox firmly establish and show everything about Adam and Kate’s relationship with the acting, lighting, set design, especially the color choice, and composition whenever the couple are on screen. For example, in the opening, Adam is sitting enveloped in darkness listening to a podcast so not really present in his reality and already reacting to something that is not really there. Kate is in the corner of the screen enveloped in light and color. In the first kitchen scene, which opens edited in the same style as the Raimi cycle of the “Evil Dead” franchise, Kate is sitting on a counter with a brown wall showing that she is grounded whereas Adam’s feet are on a blue (liminal dream space color) floor with a roughly painted green wall behind him, which is the color initially associated with the titular character. The texture of the wall mirrors the nascent creation of the killer and its weak but bustling to find root in its creator but not wholly finished. Also notice how the characters are framed.
“Big Baby” is one of the rare movies in which a viewer can understand the appeal of individual characters, root for them to be together while also seeing the red flags without anyone being a soup to nuts villain. Adam is invested in his work, perceptive and in need of community, but when his community responds to his bids for attention, he turns his incisive eye on them and uses them as critic substitutes to direct his vitriol. Was the role of Adam consciously written for a Black actor or was it color blind casting? This movie is one of the rare ones in which it could go either way, and it still works.
When Adam overhears the fictional podcast, “Blood Soaked,” hosts, Vampire Greg (Jordan Elsass) and Steve Strange (Radek Lord), randomly ripping apart Jordan Peele as a hack, it simultaneously feels like a microaggression. It is as if they exist to find the few Black horror creators to rip them apart, but it also could be that they are the kind of guys who dismiss any mainstream success. Adam’s grievance may be warranted, but he crosses a line. Spider One’s horror feels like a relatable metaphor for creatives dealing with public criticism and recognizes the additional pressure on Black creators in particular ,who then finding catharsis in seeking revenge on the page instead of hurting people in the real world.
Adam is the only Black character in “Big Baby,” and though the issue of race is never discussed, there is a brief exchange about whether to call authorities, which is immediately dismissed for obvious reasons. While it is psychological horror, it also works as horror because a man is being obliterated from the inside out, and his community is incapable of helping him because the tools available would put him in further danger, Adam is putting them at risk, and there are limits to their shared experience and ability to see his pain. There is also a subtle substory with James clearly adoring his friend, consistently doing the well-intentioned wrong thing, and desperately trying to leverage his help into a way to piggyback off of his friend’s success.
Scott and Fox have genuine chemistry and make an adorable couple. Spyder One can write women characters. Initially some may be concerned that Fox is nothing more than a supportive girlfriend/amateur therapist, but in other scenes, her distinct outlook on life shines through. Also, she has limits and reacts realistically. It is refreshing to have a girlfriend character who genuinely has a life outside of her boyfriend, a job (no idea doing what), and friends although she may have met them through Adam, but they are just as much her friends as his. Fox’s character could have been depicted as unlikable or a villain, but Fox and Spider One treat Kate fairly.
“Big Baby” loses momentum in the third act when Adam completely surrenders to writing the story. Spider One and Scott seemed to pay homage to Jack Nicholson’s performance in “The Shining” (1980), but the problem is how do you depict another story that is frankly less interesting than the real world. In part, the story’s point is that Adam’s fictional world pales in comparison to the real world and is obviously in danger when he immerses himself in such monotony with the delusion that it is good. The movie within the movie is one of the least interesting recent homages to “Friday the 13th” franchise with “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (2026) and “In a Violent Nature” (2024) in the lead. Is the scariest part of the movie that Adam is actually a hack who got lucky? Ha! It may be the point, but it does not quite work.
Also, the visual quality of those scenes is not as strong as the earlier ones. The screener for “Big Baby” could not be played on television, so the largest available screen was my desktop. In the first hour, all the night scenes were crisp and visible, but the movie within the movie was more like the “Game of Thrones” episode in the battle against the Night King. It is the equivalent of listening to the radio. Maybe the scenes are fine if they play on a different device and are more engrossing so consider yourself warned and try to watch it on as large a screen as possible or test the trailer on whatever device that you want to watch it on. I suspect that larger or smaller screens that are far enough away to not pick up on the viewer’s reflection will improve the experience.
The danger of a movie ending on a weaker note is that people may be more inclined to forget the excellent elements. Please watch “Big Baby” and appreciate that it accomplishes far more than what does not work. Spider One is on the right track.
