“Baby Reindeer” and “Under the Bridge” Are Stranger Than Fiction

In the present, convinced that his encounters with Darrien have “shifted” his desires, Donny treats his own orientation as a riddle to solve. His misery helps to explain his passivity toward Martha, whom he’s loath to report to the police, even as she exhibits increasingly violent behavior; for all her volatility, she sees him the way he wants to be seen. Her jealous antics also provide him with a reason to distance himself from Teri (Nava Mau), a trans woman Donny is at once enamored of and embarrassed by, terrified that he’ll be outed as anything but a cisgender man seeking cis women. In his shaky internal logic, Martha’s public advances burnish his heterosexuality while his private romance with Teri threatens it.