Nicole Kidman is a tightly wound girlboss undone by Harris Dickinson’s domineering intern in Halina Reijn’s skin-pricklingly seductive erotic thriller. By Yasmin Omar
The life of the tech CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) is rigidly ordered. Each minute, each second, is pruned to its optimal capacity. At home, she packs her daughters’ lunches with handwritten notes; orders birthday presents; schedules family photoshoots; fishes a dead skunk from the swimming pool. This sense of structure is also apparent in her office wardrobe – a parade of clean-cut tailored suits and diaphanous high-necked blouses, invariably styled with her hair pulled back in a harsh chignon. Every day, she heads to Manhattan’s 31 West 27th Street, the headquarters of the automation company she founded, to continue taking charge. In many ways, Romy’s business is an extension of herself, since it too is designed to bring order (there are several shots of cardboard boxes being ferried through warehouses and slotted, neatly, into their rightful place). Even her downtime is active, dedicated to aesthetic improvement with cosmetic surgeries, plunge pools and EMDR light therapy.
Romy controls everyone and everything around her. She gives out orders but, deep down, she’d prefer to take them. On her knees. And that’s exactly what she does in Halina Reijn’s psychosexual thriller Babygirl, an unstinting portrait of a woman who’s been wound so tightly for so long that she cannot help but snap. Romy blows up her 19-year marriage because she is unfulfilled by the tender, sustained-eye-contact lovemaking of her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), and seeks out erotic debasement from the firm, guiding hands of her intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). She’s a girlboss, but wants to be reduced to a babygirl. It’s not complicated. Pop psychology will tell you she’s craving what she doesn’t have (a throwaway detail that Romy was raised under the stringency of cults further substantiates this theory).
This is a power-imbalance story we’ve seen a thousand times in the other direction, with Maggie Gyllenhaal cuffed to a yoke in Secretary (2002) at the behest of her employer, or Dakota Johnson bound with a ball gag to please her billionaire lover in Fifty Shades of Grey (2015). However, there has been an intriguing microtrend of older woman-younger man narratives over the past 12 months. We’ve had a perimenopausal artist lusting over a thirtysomething garage attendant in Miranda July’s conversation-starting novel All Fours; Anne Hathaway’s divorcée fall into bed with a boybander in The Idea of You; and Laura Dern’s novelist cop off with a Hemsworth in Lonely Planet. Hell, even Kidman took a bite of the age-gap apple six months ago in A Family Affair, playing an author who starts dating a bratty movie star (Zac Efron). Where Babygirl differs from these recent offerings is in its layering of strict workplace dynamics over the more hazily defined idea of what is(n’t) socially acceptable.
A Family Affair (2024)
Much of the film’s drama derives from its morally porous central relationship, its skirting around the question of who exactly has the power. In their subtext-laden first meeting, Samuel brings a dog, that has just attacked a pedestrian, to heel. The confident assurance of this gesture bewitches Romy. It isn’t long before she’s staring at him, want radiating through her, as he dances with a female colleague at the office Christmas party while Robyn tellingly sings ‘I’m in the corner, watching you kiss her’ on the soundtrack. The chemistry between Kidman and Dickinson is charged enough to give a hospitalising electric shock, and is amplified by the suggestive cacophony of panting, groaning and vocalising in the sound design.
Reijn frames the pair’s early encounters like a duel, the camera flicking between the characters with a metronomic rhythm as they size each other up. Dickinson is brilliantly pliable, knowing when to toggle between boyish cheekiness and assertive domination. Contrary to the uptight Romy, Samuel exhibits a laidback, gum-chewing comfort that at times verges on indifference (he shows up to their initial dingy hotel tryst in a sloppy Adidas tracksuit, and is mildly amused to find her already there waiting for him). He is something of a question mark, whose motivations Dickinson – quite rightly – resists fully revealing. Will he make good on his blackmailing promise to ruin Romy’s life if she disobeys him? Does he even enjoy bossing her around in the bedroom? The way Samuel softens his imperatives with ‘maybes’ suggests she’s getting more out of this arrangement than he is.
Babygirl (2024)
Kidman’s work on Babygirl has been earning her awards, most notably Venice’s Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and is likely to continue collecting prizes throughout the season. It’s a performance that’s typically seen as ‘brave’ for a woman, as it dares to show her in an unflattering light. Getting Botox on screen – and having your fictional child (Esther McGregor) chastise you for looking like ‘a dead fish’ – is quite a vulnerable thing to do. But it’s not this, or even the occasional nudity, that makes Kidman’s characterisation of Romy commendably fearless.
What’s most admirable is her willingness to fully let go in the many sex scenes. (Sidebar: leave it to an Australian [Kidman] and a Dutchwoman [Reijn] to give American puritanism the middle finger with their unapologetic depictions of physical pleasure.) We remain on the actress’ face during sex, static on her palm-over-mouth grunting, her bulging eyes as her lover’s fingers enter her mouth, her tongue lapping milk from a saucer like a cat in heat. She is a woman possessed, placing lust at the top of her pyramid of needs. Few performers of Kidman’s stature have the backbone to take on a role like this. More power to her.
Babygirl (2024)
She and Banderas, as long-term partners swinging in a hammock of soothing yet stifling routine, bounce off each other well. The actor, most recently seen as the handsome tugboat captain in Paddington in Peru (2024), is very good in Babygirl, a saturnine theatre director projecting wounded insecurity in his husky, Spanish-inflected growl. Reijn, who also wrote the film, appears more at ease fleshing out its romantic relationships, since its only other significant female character, Romy’s assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde), rings false.
Underappreciated by her employer, Esme is constantly parroting empty, women-in-business corporate speak to curry favour and secure a promotion. Fair enough. However, Esme is Black, so for her to talk about womanhood with the blinkered privilege only white women are afforded simply doesn’t work. Save for the odd collar-grabbingly obvious metaphor – Samuel dancing shirtless to George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ (1987), Jacob mounting a production of the marital-dissatisfaction play Hedda Gabler (1891) – the script is mostly compelling, moving sleekly, and astutely investigating power dynamics, desire and office politics.
Babygirl ends with an exhale, feeling like a spiritual sequel to Kidman’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. In that movie, stuck in a toy shop at Christmastime, Kidman looks her husband dead in the eyes and says, ‘There is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.’ ‘What’s that?’ he enquires. And then comes her final, indelible response: ‘Fuck.’
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