By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
There is a question that follows married couples like a stray cat: are you two having kids? Writer-director Lauren Miller Rogen has fielded it long enough, by her own account, to build a movie around it — and the answer she and her husband, producer and star Seth Rogen, eventually gave the world became a headline in itself.
"Babies," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, stars Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen as a couple wrestling with the choice to remain childless, in a film The Guardian's review calls "often insightful yet largely run-of-the-mill" — a breezy comedy that owes a clear debt to the Judd Apatow school of relationship movies Rogen himself helped build.
The premise leans into something more honest than most studio comedies bother with: the strange judgment still reserved for people who say no, or even maybe, to parenthood. As the review notes, we live in an age that prizes tolerance for unconventional choices, yet the sad head-tilt and the "but you'd make such great parents" still greet anyone who opts out. Miller Rogen, married to one of Hollywood's most recognizable comic actors, has apparently lived this exchange enough times to turn it into ninety-some minutes of screen time.
Whether "Babies" transcends its influences is, per the Guardian's assessment, an open question — insightful in patches, formulaic in others. But the film's real interest may lie less in its jokes than in its origin: a couple's private argument, dramatized, distributed, and now debated by strangers in a festival crowd. That alone says something about what we still expect couples to answer for.
No U.S. release date was specified in festival coverage.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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