Everybody’s Watching Danielle: How the Camera Reproduces the Surveillance of the Modern Young Woman in Shiva Baby (2020)

WORDS: Maheen Usman

At shiva, everyone’s looking around the room, judging. Who’s gained weight? Who’s in grad school? Who’s dating? Danielle, our protagonist, represents every daughter of an immigrant or ethnic household going home after a long period of time. She has eyes on her. Her mother and various aunties have commented on her weight. She sees awkward and unwelcome guests scurrying between the halls. Every room brings a new set of unpleasant interaction, but she can’t seem to leave.  The film mines humor from dread. The humor isn’t even very exaggerated. In fact, it’s recognizable. Every painfully timed interruption and invasive question land because it feels so familiar. Seligman invites us to laugh at Danielle's predicament even as she traps both Danielle and the audience inside it.

The film is shot and edited like a horror movie: dramatic music, jump scares, building tension. Its “big bad” isn’t a scary monster though. It’s societal expectations. Seligman’s directorial debut is an artful, anxiety-driven comedy. She bottles up introspective tensions and contemporary womanhood. Then, she brings them to boil over an hour and seventeen minutes as the viewer gets taken on a trip through a tightly wound family affair, fast-paced and fraught with wit and strife from the characters. These interactions are filmed and cut to be tense and claustrophobic. The camera cuts abruptly, and it closes in for uncomfortably long periods. The rare wide shots function almost like exhaling. For a brief moment, the audience regains their bearings, and Danielle seems to have escaped the suffocating proximity of the camera. The relief, however, is always short-lived. Another relative appears in the doorway. Someone calls her name. Another conversation begins before the last one has even really ended. The frame closes in once more.

Seligman uses this cycle of compression and release to mirror the rhythm of social anxiety itself. Every moment of respite is interrupted by another demand for Danielle's attention, another reminder that she is being watched. She has to perform. There is something particularly revealing about the fact that Danielle's scrutiny comes from people who ostensibly care about her. The questions aren’t malicious in isolation. They are delivered as conversation, concern, even affection. Collectively, however, they amount to an almost relentless onslaught of judgements and assessments of her life. Her body becomes a subject of discussion, her career a measure of ambition, and her relationships an indication of whether she’s impressive and respectable. What makes the film so uncomfortable is that Danielle cannot quite object without appearing unreasonable. Everyone’s just catching up and sharing in their grief, after all. What’s so wrong with that? She is expected to accept the attention as part of belonging. In this sense, the surveillance is not imposed upon her. It’s sustained by the very social structures that are supposed to offer her unconditional love and protection. 

Seligman’s camera refuses the neutrality we expect from cinema. The lens becomes another relative at the shiva. It crowds Danielle's face, corners her in narrow frames, and follows her every movement with invasive curiosity. Rather than offering the audience an objective view, the camera adopts the same scrutinizing gaze that governs Danielle's world, collapsing the distance between observer and participant. By refusing visual distance, the film transforms ordinary social rituals into psychological horror and reveals how familiar that horror can feel for women taught that every room contains another pair of judging eyes. The camera is an inanimate object capable of such animate actions and feelings, judgement and anxiety chief among them.

It sets the tone for a movie that would otherwise be something of a run-of-the-mill story on the misfit, black swan daughter. The audience spectates intently as this woman in front of them tackles her identity, culture, career, and potential bisexuality in front of practically everyone she’s ever known. It’s a peek inside the everyday surveillance of young women, if there ever was one. We’re invited to watch her have her life picked apart as she questions everything. In doing so, we become complicit in the very scrutiny the film spends its runtime exposing.

By the time the credits roll, the audience has spent an hour and seventeen minutes watching Danielle squirm. How readily would we have joined the family in causing the discomfort?