Film review: Babes is a deep dive into the messy business of having babies

Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau star in this film 

BABES follows inseparable childhood best friends Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau), having grown up together in NYC, now firmly in different phases of adulthood.

• Babes 
• ★★★☆☆ 
• Cinematic release

Babes (15A) stars Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau as Eden and Dawn, New Yorkers and inseparable friends who start to experience cracks in their relationship when Eden decides to have a baby after falling pregnant in the wake of a one-night stand just as Dawn is about to give birth to her second child.

Written by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, with Pamela Adlon directing, Babes is a deep dive into the messy business — physical, emotional and
psychological — of having babies, and Glazer and Buteau clearly revel in the opportunity to celebrate the more prosaic truths that lie behind the baby-making myths.

The raucous self-aggrandising of their brash personas can grate at times, but Glazer and Buteau are individually and collectively strong here, with both in scene-stealing form as they enact their latest audacious assault on polite society. 

The story, however, isn’t quite as convincing: The gradual self-awareness that dawns on the childishly self-absorbed Eden as she negotiates the latter stages of her pregnancy is overdue by roughly a decade.