Film Review: Sno Babies

STUDIO: Better Noise Films | DIRECTOR: Bridget Smith | CAST: Katie Kelly, Paola Andino, Michael Lombardi, Shannan Wilson
RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2020
SPECS: NR | 109 min. | Drama

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie  1/2

Films on teenage addiction have been a mainstay for decades (too long, actually), kicking off in the Fifties and yielding a number of lauded feature films ever since, not to mention dozens of TV movies with names like The Secret Life of Zoey, Desperate Lives and Perfect High.

There’ve also been many set to, or at least embellished by, a rock’n’roll soundtrack, dating back to Jerry Lee Lewis’s title track for 1958’s High School Confidential and moving forward with Go Ask Alice, Less Than Zero, Kids, Thirteen and so on, up through last year’s Beautiful Boy (which makes exceptional use of both Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings,” a rather incongruous one-two punch).

Sno Babies, directed and edited by first-time feature filmmaker Bridget Smith, is the latest drama to trumpet the answers to the arguably terrifying question of “What are your kids doing??” And it does so with frank, straightforward filmmaking that properly avoids any of the overly hip bits and posturing that deflects from the cautionary message that are often found in other movies. (Trainspotting, anyone?) Yeah, Sno Babies is unabashedly a message movie that clearly presents what it wants to say rather than loudly preaching it.

Katie Kelly (l.) and Paola Andino in Sno Babies.

Kristen (Katie Kelly) and Hannah (an all grown-up Paola Andino from Nickelodeon’s Every Witch Way) are middle-class Catholic schoolgirls in the Philadelphia suburbs who enjoy popping their oxy and DH9—they even pass pills to each other while waiting in line for communion at church. Within a half-hour of meeting the young ladies, Kristen joins Hannah in shooting heroin, beginning a downward spiral that finds Kristen getting pregnant, lying to her frequently absent parents, rupturing her friendship with Hannah and attempting to manipulate her SAT tutor to cover for her.

Things get worse—a lot worse, for both girls—before they get only nominally better.

Smith’s direction is straightforward and unadorned, save for a little flash during a party sequence in the early going. Most effective are her depictions of cooking heroin and shooting up (often into the most private of places), scoring drugs on the street and other drug-related activities, like falsifying a urine sample—all are ugly, harsh and tense without being tawdry. Smith also serves as her own editor, where she is serviceably adept at keeping things moving.

The performances are solid across the board, with Katie Kelly gamely taking on some particularly harrowing material. Like the film’s direction, Michael Walsh’s script is at its strongest when tackling the logistics and behavior that goes along with procuring and using drugs. An intersecting subplot about a neighboring couple trying to have a baby isn’t that strong though its climax involving a coyote is definitely strange, off-putting and memorable—all at the same time.

Oh, yeah, and there’s a hard-rock soundtrack, led by a trio of numbers  from Nikki Sixx’s outfit Sixx:A.M. Such grinders as the band’s “Belly of the Beast” and Eva Under Fire’s “Heroin(e)” are none too subtle but, again, neither is the sight of a pregnant high-schooler looking to score smack on a late-night city street.

Though Sno Babies doesn’t fall into the faith-based category and it generally avoids waving its cautionary finger in our faces, there’s some sermonizing in the final scene that calls communities to band together and help each other. But not to worry—in the spirit of rock’n’roll, the speaker is looking good in a black Sixx:A.M. t-shirt.

A portion of Better Noise Films’ profits from Sno Babies will be donated to Global Recovery Initiative Foundation (GRI) to support those in early recovery, as will a portion for every stream of the soundtrack and the Sixx:A.M. song “Maybe It’s Time.”