"Baby Ruby" is a horror story for women. Or set among women, at any rate. I hesitate to presume anything on behalf of my fellow life voyagers, but I think women will instantly recognize the dark outlines of the story told here.

It centers on a woman named Jo (Noemie Merlant, of "Tar"), a lifestyle vlogger living with her husband, Spencer (Kit Harington), in a woodsy East Coast suburb. Jo is a French expatriate (her vlog is called "French Girl Style") and she's nearing the end of a pregnancy. The movie gets underway with the arrival of her baby, Ruby, which also marks the sudden, awful end of the unencumbered life Jo has known. There have been forewarnings: Encountering a new mother one day while still heavy with child, she was surprised to be asked, "Are you scared?" and puzzled by the woman's angry refusal to let Jo peek inside her baby stroller.

Home from the hospital, baby Ruby proves to be a handful, crying not just a lot, but all day and all night, nonstop. Since the movie has the shape of a body horror film, we're not sure at first if Jo is hallucinating this devil child, who inflicts a bloody bite on her chest while nursing. Jo starts losing her grip on what she once thought of as everyday life. And support is scarce. A doctor tells her, condescendingly, that "babies cry" — so? "Do you ever feel that your baby is angry with you?" she asks a new mom-friend named Shelly (Meredith Hagner). Finally, she consults her mother-in-law, Doris (Jayne Atkinson), who recalls her own violently mixed feelings after Spencer's birth. "I prayed to God for someone to just come and take this baby away from me," Doris says, "so that I could go back to being who I was before. But also, I knew that wasn't going to happen. I was trapped."

The movie's writer-director, Bess Wohl, who's also a playwright and an actor, has accomplished something uncommon here: making the terrors of postpartum depression nearly as harrowing for the largely male horror audience as they must be for the women undergoing them.

'THE OUTWATERS'

The found-footage horror movie is back, you'll be happy to know. Or maybe you won't. I remember exiting a screening of the 1999 "Blair Witch Project" — the original FF movie — with a friend who found that sitting through it had been like "watching radio." I wasn't a huge "Blair Witch" fan myself — unlike multimillions of other moviegoers worldwide who were. (The picture was made for well under $1 million dollars and has grossed nearly $250 million to date.)

The most talked-about of the new found-footage films — although talk doesn't always tell you much — has been Kyle Edward Ball's "Skinamarink," which some people find to be eminently spooky, while others would rather eat nails than sit through it a second time.

Now we have "The Outwaters," by New Jersey filmmaker Robbie Banfitch, who takes the found-footage genre back to its roots. Banfitch tells his story — about four friends who have driven out to the Mojave Desert to make a music video — through the use of three vid-cam memory cards, which were found in the vast Mojave sands unaccompanied by their owners.

One of the sad truths of low-budget filmmaking is that it's hard to make a good movie with no money, but simplicity itself to make a bad one. "The Outwaters" isn't a bad movie, exactly. Banfitch, who wrote, directed, shot and edited it, has a flair for sound design — for the careful placement of swarming voices and shrieking serpents in the night. He can also make rich use of color (the frenzied conclusion of this movie suggests what the psychedelic stargate sequence at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey" might have been like if Kubrick had been forced to create it with whatever spare change happened to be jingling around in his pocket).

The picture's shortcomings, however, do it serious damage. Virtually nothing happens in this movie (beyond wandering banter) until about an hour in; and the traditional shaky-cam overload becomes as annoying here as it ever did in the past. It may be hard, at this late date, to find anyone who wants to sit through all that again.