Babyface (2026)
I try to find something to hold onto in everything I watch, some spark of intention or craft even when a film is not working, but Sacha Beeley's Babyface defeated me. It is a six-minute animated short that I found close to unwatchable, an amateurish, charmless little thing with nothing underneath it, and I cannot in good conscience give it more than a single star.
The premise, if you can call it that, is summed up by the film's own logline: Spoon finds a coupon. That is roughly the sum of it. A walking, talking spoon bumbles through a handful of events that never cohere into anything resembling a story, and the film mistakes sheer randomness for imagination. There is a difference between absurdism that is built on some underlying logic or feeling and absurdism that is simply a string of non-sequiturs, and Babyface is firmly the latter, abstract to the point of meaninglessness, as though scenes were generated and stitched together with no thought as to why.
The art style is the other problem, and a fatal one. It is crude and basic in a way that reads as unfinished rather than deliberately lo-fi, and it took me straight back to the very first wave of Flash animations that washed across YouTube and Newgrounds in the early days of the internet. I grew up on that stuff, and at its best, the David Firth end of it, there was a genuine warped vision and a real sense of craft hiding inside the grot. Babyface has the roughness without the vision, the ugliness without the wit, and the nostalgia it stirred only made the comparison more unflattering.
I kept waiting for the turn, the gag or the image or the sudden swerve into something that would justify the whole exercise, and it never came. There is no story, no character worth the name, no idea being explored, and no visual pleasure to fall back on in the meantime. It is six minutes that feel considerably longer, and I came out of it faintly baffled that it exists in the form it does.
One star. I take no pleasure in writing a review this negative, and I am sure there is an audience somewhere for Babyface's particular brand of anything-goes nonsense, but it was not for me in any respect. It was not worth watching, and I would struggle to recommend it to anyone. A rare total miss.
Babyface screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Life / Drawing animated shorts programme.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Pride (2014), The Muppet Movie (1979)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
