‘Baby Doe’ Review: Devastating Doc Does Justice to an Inconceivable Crime of Infanticide

variety.com:

Stephen Saito Director Jessica Earnshaw has an eye for blind spots. Traveling to Northeast Ohio for her tremendous second feature “Baby Doe,” she ventures into the kind of working class, deeply religious enclave that is typically overlooked in America, or at least often reduced to stereotypes in its depiction on screen.

But with considerable sensitivity and empathy, she is also able to pick up on how people can become unconscious of the most painful elements of their lives. “Baby Doe” looks to make sense of what would be an otherwise inexplicable case of infanticide and how the mother involved, Gail Ritchey, could claim to have been completely unaware that she was pregnant until delivery and remained unaware of how or why she disposed of the baby after giving birth.

It’s an undeniably tough watch, but Earnshaw has a way of putting her subjects at ease to access the typically unreachable. Her equally harrowing debut “Jacinta” saw her camera roam around the grounds of a prison, and the director has similar free rein here, meeting with Gail and her family well ahead of a court trial where she faces a life sentence for the murder of the baby.

The case poses a fascinating question around belated justice. The death occurred in 1993, but was only recently unearthed by local law enforcement due to DNA technology that linked her to the corpse.