YNOT at the Movies

As a Massachusetts courtroom tries to establish that Lindsay Clancy, on trial for killing her three children, was too mentally ill to be held responsible for it, director Jessica Earnshaw's "Baby Doe" (U.S.A. 2025 | 100 min. | Documentary) follows another mother on trial for killing her baby who gets no such defense. Gail Ritchey is a grandmother, a churchgoer, a suspect in a thirty-year-old death. The film would rather sit with her contradictions than resolve them.

The film opens on a cold case breaking open. In 1993, Ritchey gave birth alone in rural Geauga County, Ohio, and left the newborn in the woods. She says the baby was stillborn. Decades later, genealogical DNA testing identifies her as the mother, and Ritchey, now a suburban wife and grandmother, is arrested for murder.

This is Earnshaw's second documentary feature. Her first, "Jacinta" (2020), followed a woman recently released from prison trying to rebuild a relationship with her young daughter. Both films stay close to a mother moving through the justice system without losing sight of the family caught up in it. Earnshaw spends most of her runtime here with Ritchey at home rather than in court. Her husband Mark and their adult children, Evan and Courtney, appear less as witnesses building a defense than as a family trying to hold a shape they no longer recognize. Ritchey's mother Nancy and her friend Patty, a pastor's wife, round out the picture of the conservative Christian community that shaped Ritchey's life, the same community now forced to reckon with what Ritchey is accused of. Defense attorney Steven Bradley and trial consultant Paul Jepsen work the legal machinery around her. Prosecutors Nick Burling and Jim Flaiz, and Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand, represent a system with far less patience for ambiguity.

What the film does not do is treat guilty or innocent as its focal point. A true crime documentary usually withholds the truth of what happened until the end. This film isn't interested in that kind of suspense. It gives Ritchey's account early and often. It spends its remaining time on a harder problem instead: whether a sympathetic woman can also be a woman who did something unforgivable. A judge in the film says he cannot try to rationalize the two Ritcheys, the one on trial and the one who raised three children in a church pew. That's precisely the project Earnshaw has taken on: building sympathy for Ritchey while never resolving whether she should be forgiven for what happened. Those two impulses pull against each other for most of the film's runtime.

Religion runs under every scene without ever getting named as the film's real subject. Ritchey's community treated an unmarried pregnancy as a catastrophe, and that judgment was enough to make her hide the pregnancy from everyone around her, including herself. Thirty years of prayer and repentance haven't undone what that silence produced. The film names the condition directly: unperceived pregnancy, in which a person in crisis dissociates from a pregnancy entirely. Unlike Clancy's case, though, nobody in the documentary argues that Ritchey didn't know what she was doing. What they argue, instead, is that shame did the deciding for her.

That refusal to diagnose is the film's most interesting choice and also its most frustrating one. Earnshaw clearly believes the true cause of what happened to Ritchey sits somewhere in the intersection of purity culture, isolation, and a justice system with no mechanism for nuance. But she never says so outright. She lets sympathy stand in for analysis instead. The result is a film that makes you feel for Ritchey without ever forcing you to reckon with what put her there. It's an unsatisfying kind of mercy, extended to the film's own argument as much as to its subject.

"Baby Doe" begins streaming digitally Thursday, September 17, 2026, after a festival run last year and a subsequent theatrical release.