Ryan’s Babe (2000)

With Christopher Nolan’s latest, The Odyssey, on the horizon, I wanted to revisit another epic journey. One filled with strange encounters, unexpected detours, and a protagonist who spends most of his adventure looking utterly confused. And don’t worry, whether you’ve seen it or not, you’ll be just as perplexed. 

It’s not Homer’s Odyssey. It’s Ryan’s Babe. Courtesy of our good friends up north in Canada. 

How does one even begin to explain Ryan's Babe? Over the years, it's become a talking point among bloggers, critics, and YouTube reviewers alike, all seemingly attempting to answer the same question: what the hell is going on?

Released in 2000, Ryan’s Babe was written and directed by Ray Ramayya and filmed in Saskatchewan, Canada. The film largely disappeared after its initial release, only to be resurrected years later by cult movie fans who stumbled upon it and collectively decided that the rest of us needed to experience this too.

Let’s get into the plot. Or, rather, a series of things that happen. Because that’s exactly what this movie is. It’s literally a collection of scenes strung together with little to no connection between them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Our main character, Ryan, is trying to get home. Home from where? Who cares? We never learn that. He just wants to see his babe, or more accurately, a woman who can’t seem to shake her feelings for Ryan despite him spending their entire shared history showing little interest in her.

Things only get more confusing from there. This movie goes into Inception levels of flashbacks. You’ll get a flashback within a flashback, followed by a transition that makes you think you’ve finally returned to the present day. Nope, wrong. You’re still in another flashback. WHAT?!

As if that wasn’t enough, this entire movie is ADR’d to all hell. To the point where there’s a scene in which a character appears to have two completely different actors’ voices coming out of his mouth.

We meet new characters, they disappear. More new characters show up, they disappear too. There are so many different storylines packed into this that it feels like someone accidentally condensed an entire season of television drama into a 90-minute movie.

Oh, did I say drama? Because judging by the movie poster, you’d think this was some goofy road-trip boner comedy where Ryan takes a zany wrong turn, somehow ends up in Las Vegas, and Snoop Dogg randomly appears halfway through to dispense life advice.

I’m completely making this up, and yet it somehow feels no less plausible than anything that actually happens in Ryan’s Babe.

Things that happen to our main character:

• He trades his car with a couple stranded on the side of the road. The wife complains that she hates the shade of her husband’s green car. It’s blue. Not green. Blue.

• He gets kidnapped and drugged by a group of cheerleaders because they’re convinced he’s the man who attacked their friend.

• He befriends a bartender by quoting Homer. The bartender immediately decides Ryan should work with him at a strip club so they can meet women. Ryan then hooks up with an older widow who becomes interested in him because he reminds her of her late football-player husband. After they sleep together, she dies. Ryan leaves.

These are just a few examples, because why spoil the entire thing? This is a movie that needs to be seen, then talked about, then probably seen again because you’ll have no idea what you just witnessed.

Oh, and because subtlety was apparently never on the table, in an early scene Ryan is literally reading from Homer’s Odyssey.

While Ryan’s Babe won’t be allowed in the No Homers Club—because we let Homer Glumplich in, and we’re only allowed to have one—it does earn a special place on the Mount Rushmore of all-time head-scratching, bizarre films.

Bravo, Canada.