IFFK 2025 | 'Ebb' Movie Review: A Spectacular Misfire from Jeo Baby

Heterosexuals are really fraught. Their desires are mapped onto their gender privilege or lack thereof, so every act of penetrative sex can be framed as un-feminist, the man, literally, invading the woman, but because it is desire, and because the loins throb with a logic that the brain often cannot keep up with, this disjunction is left for the ‘political lesbians’ to debate and deal with. 

Writer-director Jeo Baby, who previously unmasked the gruelling and cumulative violence of heterosexual marriage in The Great Indian Kitchen and the tender dysfunction of queerness in a rabidly surveilled heterosexual world in Kathal, now wants to take a stab at open marriages. 

The problem is men, a man, really—Adarsh (Baby, himself), a graphic designer who works from home, fielding calls from clients, masturbating to his own erotic etchings. If as director Sanjay Leela Bhansali notes, the top shot is god’s view of the world, Baby’s god is a pervert. The first half of the film largely takes place through top shots of different beds in post coital hush. 

At first, Adarsh is masturbating. Then, Adarsh is in bed with a woman who, rambling and reluctant, brings up Maria (Divya Prabha), Adarsh’s wife. Maria knows about Adarsh’s affair, but the woman is unsure of how she will behave if they meet publicly. Adarsh swats her soft anxieties with his hard certainty. He seems to walk through the world knowing exactly what he wants—of himself, but as we grow to see, of others, too. 

The chronology is important here. Adarsh first pursued his affair. And then, he confronted his wife with it, opening up the marriage, because Adarsh, and perhaps, humans, but mostly men, and certainly this man is not made for monogamy. Maria concedes. Infidelity and open marriages are different, but here, the film tries to collapse these two. So far, so male. 

In the following scene, we see Maria in bed with Siddharth (Jitin Puthanchery), where his wife Farzana and his guilt is brought up. Farzana does not know about Siddharth’s affair. They have a child together, and their top shots are not post-coital, but with the child in between—this god is not a pervert, but a tender observer. 

The film turns on its head when Adarsh proposes a threesome with Maria and Siddharth. Maria, initially reluctant, agrees, but the image of his wife being eaten out by another man, not to mention Siddharth’s greater stamina, makes Adarsh spiral. The male instinct to thumb down competition kicks in. Siddharth’s exploits are not shown graphically or at all, framed through blurs or blocked foregrounds or brought up later in conversations—so many conversations, all sound and fury signifying nothing, to the point of verbal diarrhoea, the emotional riptide flattened out. The point is not Divya being pleasured; the point is Adarsh being ruined by this pleasure. Perhaps the top shot is the best visual language to give expression to this flat world, where there is no foreground—everything is distant, everything is background.

Obsessed with the aftermath of desire, the film forgets to stage desire itself, as though it is resolved. But it isn’t—to show the aftermath of desire, you must show what is at stake, the desire itself. The film wants to see Maria as a victim of Adarsh—literally, meaning principles—taking her side, without inhabiting her desire, because it is easier to apportion blame to him than to burn alongside her. Why does she stay with Adarsh after he cheats on her? Why is she drawn to him? 

I refuse to take a film seriously when it insists on how desire corrodes life, when it cannot or refuses to stage desire’s imbuing of life with pleasure, pleasure that upturns our received notions of self, dignity, and even desire. Desire is merely what is comprehended from conversations. 

Ebb turns desire into a man-ifesto, the way it turns feelings into words, because it is easier to poke at manifestos than fuller, realised lives. The film, though, breathes beautifully in the smaller details, the way Maria tries to retrieve a phone that is stuck between her and Adarsh as they are trying to cuddle, the small, charming idiosyncrasies of modern life; the way Adarsh keeps switching sides of the bed, unlike most people who prefer one side. 

Speak to anyone in open relationships and the one thing they will say is over-communicate. Every itch of the body needs to be accounted for, because it might grow into a scab that devours the body. In Ebb the over-communication is essentially Maria placating Adarsh—that she loves him, that he was the one who decided to open up the marriage, that then, she should not be held responsible for pursuing and feeling pleasure, and perhaps, (and this goes unsaid) greater pleasure from another man. These conversations, initially pointed, because recklessly repetitive, to a point of exhaustion. The circling around the same wound without really scrubbing it clean makes the film seem like it has run out of tricks. 

The running spine through the film is that our ideology never maps neatly into the practicalities of life. Heterosexual sex is precisely that—and it is an idea so banal, you wait for the film to toy with it, turning it around, and doing something besides merely stating it. 

Adarsh’s spiral, which is supposed to be the film’s clinching drama, is even visually manifested in a spiral staircase that Adarsh ascends in the climax—a juvenile metaphor, really, but a striking image—and becomes a series of petulant pouts. The film eventually flirting with the bizarre feels like a copout. If you have the courage to provoke, as a filmmaker, have the conviction to see it through.

Besides, the film is too short. Its runtime of over 70 minutes, includes the almost ten minute opening credits where everyone from the light boy to the focus puller to the apartment is credited. The lacking length is not a problem in and of itself, but it produces a grating sense that the film does not have much to say, except to state its provocation and scurry away, like a child ringing a bill, like a troll dropping a tweet, to recede into the dark, dark nothingness.