Babystar (2026)
We are living through one of those rare moments when a whole new way of being human is invented in real time. Just as the early twentieth century gave us the idea of "a career", our own age has conjured the influencer, and society is still scrambling to work out what that does to us. Social media connects a global village and hollows out our closeness in the same breath, and Joscha Bongard's feature debut Babystar plants itself right in that contradiction. It is a sharp, chilling and very timely piece of work, arriving just as the UK moves to ban under-sixteens from these platforms altogether. I only wish it hit as hard in the final stretch as it does in its ideas.
The family at its centre are all influencers: a mother, a father, and their teenage daughter Luca, played with real conviction by Maja Bons. The parents are young for their age and permanently on-brand, and the daughter has been the star of the show since before she was born. Everything is staged, everything is monetised, and even the visitors to the house turn out to be an arranged brand opportunity. Nothing here is quite real. Bongard is bold enough to run this world for a full twenty five minutes before the title card even appears, which is one heck of a prologue, and it works, dropping you deep into the airless perfection of their lives before the story proper begins.
The film is at its best when it is being quietly savage. There is a superb thread involving an AI firm building digital avatars of the family so that fans around the world can interact with them, sold with the breathtakingly cynical logic that children are growing up too isolated and this will bring connection back. Using AI and a fake avatar to cure the loneliness that AI and fake avatars created is exactly the kind of cruel irony the film does so well. Elsewhere we learn that Luca's entire life has been content, from the scans to the birth to the potty training, and a scene of her discussing something as private as her first period on her mother's podcast lands like a warning: a future in which nothing is sacred, nothing is private, and everything is broadcast.
Then the cracks widen. When the parents decide to have another child, Luca is sidelined, forced to watch them podcast about her supposed brattishness without ever actually talking to her, and her rebellions escalate from small provocations to genuine crises. The bleakest joke of all is that the parents simply absorb it, even reframing one of her outbursts as an AI fabrication to keep the brand clean. The strongest passage comes when she escapes into the orbit of an ordinary family and finds she barely knows how to hold a normal conversation, blurting something jarring about a funeral that stops the room dead. It is a lovely, sad idea, a girl raised as a product learning what people are actually like.
And this is where Babystar frustrated me. For all its intelligence, it never converts its themes into drama. It builds and builds toward a reckoning that simply never detonates. The confrontation between daughter and parents that the whole film seems to be promising never happens head on. The AI avatar thread is quietly abandoned rather than paid off. A relationship that hovers at the edge of the story is never explored, or even really confirmed. Time and again a big beat arrives and then dissipates, this then this then this, with no real consequence or repercussion attached. It is the feeling of a sneeze that builds and builds and then just dies away, and it is oddly maddening. By the finale I was still waiting for the release the film kept teasing, and it never quite came.
Three and a half stars. Babystar is a really good film, well acted, cleverly built and bang on the money as social commentary, and as a debut it marks Bongard out as a talent to watch. But it is weighed down by its own message, guilty of pulling more threads than it is willing to follow, and it stops short of the greatness its opening promises. Worth your time for its ideas and its nerve. Just do not expect it to land the knockout blow it spends two hours winding up.
Babystar premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It is in UK and Irish cinemas from 25th September. Reviewed from a screener provided by the distributor.
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