American Baby

“Nobody walks in Texas,” Oli (Abigail Pniowsky) tells her Ukrainian immigrant mother, but she is made to walk to school nonetheless. Her mother tells her that it will be good for her to get some exercise at eight months. She is effectively put on display. Along the length of the road, we get a look at the community which has shaped her life. The hot sun; the low, spacious houses; the conservatively dressed white people, staring, unabashed. Her slender 15-year-old figure. Her round belly. The way she holds her head up as if she actually believes that she’s a good person.

“What you did was immoral,” her teacher tells her, revealing that she’s going to be suspended for the rest of the school year, regardless of what the law says. She finds out on the same day that her class receives the news of the death of senior student Eva Reid, whose body was found on the train tracks. One has to wonder. Likewise when we see Oli, in a flashback, walking to a party with her friend Miriam (Claire Capek), who is trying to persuade her to hook up with a boy she likes. “What about abstinence?” she asks, and it’s painfully clear, in an instant, that that’s all these kids have been taught.

American Baby takes viewers on a tour of the US teen pregnancy experience. Director Ellen Rodnianski packs in as much as she reasonably can, and each time it feels like a bit too much, one need only step back for a moment and take a look at the real world. Particularly resonating with teenagers, the film, which screened at the 2025 Austin Film Festival, might have been limited to that audience were it not for an extraordinary performance by Pniowsky, who has raw star quality of the sort most actors can only dream of. There’s a intense vulnerability to it, as she captures a character balanced right on the cusp between childhood and adulthood. This is a story told a thousand times, but she feels unpredictable, electric.

Also deserving of note is Elisha Henig, who plays Toby, the father of Oli’s baby. The two have very little screentime together but connect at a level essential to making the rest of it work. Not far in, Oli is again out walking when a boy who we see elsewhere persecuting Toby starts screaming at he about how he’s been sent away because of her, how she’s a slut who has ruined his life. She doesn’t know where he’s gone, wants desperately to contact him. Everything seems to have been decided for her. Because she doesn’t want an abortion – something which a whole lot of people imply she should do, despite condemning it in principle – her mother will take the baby and raise it as if it were her own. She won’t even get to choose the name.

Despite Oli’s status as an object of scorn and fascination, much of the story is told through her gaze. The way she looks at other teenagers laughing and talking together on their way to high school, just on the other side of the road but a million miles away. The way that the community she has grown up in becomes strange to her. It’s a brutal coming-of-age, but not altogether a negative one, as for the first time she begins to recognise the hypocrisy around her, to realise the shallowness of the illusions that she’s being sacrificed to preserve. Though voices generally remain calm, words polite, carefully chosen, we’re not a world away from folk horror. Still, in contrast to the fragility of it all, she begins to be aware of her own strength.

Hope springs from the most unlikely places in a story that’s all too close to reality for a generation of young people growing up in parts of today’s US. American baby has a kicker of an ending which holds out no promise of respite but puts all the rest in proportion.

Reviewed on: 28 Oct 2025