Big Baby

Big Baby centers on Adam Lewis (Brandon Scott), a horror screenwriter and first-time filmmaker whose debut film was poorly received — the story opens with Adam listening to a podcast in which critics brutally pan his work, with some even suggesting he harm himself. Struggling for creative direction, Adam experiences a violent nightmare featuring a hulking maniac wearing a creepy baby mask, and the vision becomes the spark for his next screenplay, which he titles 'Big Baby.' As he develops the script, however, his grip on reality begins to slip. Murders seem to occur around him, but Adam cannot tell whether what he witnesses is real, a dream, or a product of his own unraveling imagination. His girlfriend Kate (Krsy Fox) observes his deteriorating mental state at close range; though their chemistry is established and their relationship feels lived-in, Kate gradually loses both patience and trust as Adam sinks deeper into his obsession. The film operates as a meta slasher: it explicitly toys with the concept of a creator losing control of the nightmare he is committing to the page, blurring slasher horror, psychological breakdown, and self-referential genre commentary. The central tension hinges on whether the baby-masked killer exists as an external supernatural threat, as a manifestation of Adam's psychosis, or as something generated by the act of writing itself. The finale offers ambiguous, minimal answers to these questions, leaving the relationship between Adam's fiction and the violence surrounding him unresolved. Coverage from festival reviews notes the ending is deliberately inconclusive and divisive.

Sources: TMDb overview, Screamfest official synopsis, GeekTyrant trailer coverage, Dread Central exclusive, Film Festival Today Screamfest review, web search aggregation