Sweet Angel Baby: Canadian Drama a Heartbreaker About Women, Sexuality, and Identity

By Liz Braun

Rating: B+

Everybody has her secrets. In Melanie Oates’ delicate small-town drama Sweet Angel Baby, a quiet pillar of the community has her daily existence turned upside down when elements of her personal life are revealed.

Eliza (Michaela Kurimsky) is a soft-spoken but much-loved local in a small Newfoundland fishing town. It’s a picturesque place, all sweet houses and majestic shoreline, and the closeness of the villagers is apparent.

Eliza chops wood for her elderly neighbour, lives near her own parents, and works at a local restaurant. She’s the sort of person who makes sure a drunk woman gets home safely from a gathering — and even tucks the woman into bed.

Eliza attends the Catholic church in the village. Early on there’s a town meeting to discuss the upcoming sale of the church and its land. The intimation is that the local church will be swept away, financially, in the larger church issue of lawsuits and pedophile priests. Even one’s faith and place of worship, it turns out, are subject to the sexual proclivities of men. That’s an interesting backdrop.

When the townspeople decide that maybe they should buy the church themselves, Eliza helps organize various fundraising initiatives.

Also early on, it’s made clear that Eliza has a separate, private life that is strictly her business. She has some romantic entanglement with Toni (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers), an outsider in the cove and a lesbian.

Eliza also goes off alone into the woods and other remote places and takes pictures of herself, naked or semi-naked. The pictures are artful and interesting but never show her face, and they’ve earned her a large social media following.

A flirty encounter with one of the cool guys in town — a married man named Shawn (Peter Mooney) — turns Eliza’s head a bit. She agrees to let him come over one night, and their mutual physical attraction takes the usual course.

Midway into the encounter, Shawn tells Eliza that he has recognized her from her anonymous social media posts. What follows is a brief, intense scene of fear, betrayal, and sexual negotiation that is devastating to witness.

As word spreads about Eliza’s “secret life” and online photos, she must face the disapproval of her neighbours and her own fall from grace in the town. It’s a cruel, punishing turnaround for Eliza and hypocritical in the extreme.

No men were hurt in the making of this female outcast.

In all that narrow-minded, “small town” business, writer-director Oates has found a lens to underline the impossible road to authenticity that women travel.

Like every woman who has had to hide her light under a bushel, downplay her intellect, tamp down her sexuality or otherwise keep a dimmer switch on her abilities, Eliza now must decide how much of herself she will reveal and how much censure she can tolerate.

Sweet Angel Baby is distinguished by the performances from Kurimsky and Tailfeathers and by the visual beauty of the storytelling, courtesy cinematographer Christopher Mably. The film had its world premiere at TIFF 2024.

Sweet Angel Baby. Written and directed by Melanie Oates. Starring Michaela Kurimsky, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, and Peter Mooney. In theatres August 15.