Babygirl (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Humiliation. Degradation. Liberation. Erotic thrillers -- hell, even standard award-bait dramas -- rarely traffic in such themes. The rarely grand tradition of erotic thriller is a prurient pleasure of mine, and it's certainly what has made Nicole Kidman my favorite actress over the years. They are almost exclusively hetero-oriented, which perhaps allows me to enjoy them without much by way of personal stakes, but Kidman always lets us in to characters using sex appeal for various (often nefarious) desired outcomes. Crucially, and contrary to most actors who get typecast or even choose to make so many films in a single subgenre, Kidman's characters are always vastly different. And few have been more honest and surprisingly accessible than Romy Mathis.

Romy, the wealthy CEO of a tech company in New York City, is on top of the world. And she's no Miranda Priestly about it; one of the early scenes shows her warmly welcoming a group of interns into her private office to personally answer questions about the company on their first day. She's not a workaholic, though she does answer her phone (that is inexplicably never on silent mode) more than a healthy person should, and in fact is apparently a loving, affectionate, and intentionally present family woman, caring deeply for her theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, who is really wonderful in a truncated role) and their two teenage daughters. The astute observer will tell you that Romy's company specializes in robots for warehouses, removing human laborers, and Jacob's current production is Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, about a woman in an unhappy marriage, so really we should know that there is going to be trouble even if we haven't seen the film's marketing.

But the film provides ample context. Its opening scene shows us specifically that their sex life is not one of egalitarian pleasure. Romy dutifully and energetically has sex with her husband, but shortly afterward she sneaks away to finish herself off in secret while watching porn. Specifically, it's porn that includes an offscreen man dominantly telling a woman what to do. It really seems to work for Romy, who psychology might tell us is tired or bored of being in charge all the time. If not Ibsen, Chekhov would certainly tell us that her secret carnal desires will be her undoing, as well as her family's, so we'd better strap in for the tragic ride.

And this is why Halina Reijn's direction and writing is so brilliant in this film. She wastes no time getting to the meat of it, sidestepping the dated tropes of visualizing Romy's perfect life, perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect house, and perfect job; those are given. Instead, we dive directly into the heat of an enseamed bed, as a notable Danish prince might say, wherein lies the real domestic danger to people with power. Reijn is interested in something far more insightful and real than the destruction of a rich white woman's family due to her voracious, taboo sexuality.

Enter Samuel, played by a mindful and demure Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats, Trust, Where the Crawdads Sing, The Iron Claw, See How They Run). His effortless suavity and confidence oozes from his clenched jaw and slumped shoulders, and Dickinson's unlikely performance only begins there. His unkempt visage and drab habiliments belie calm, firm mannerisms of someone who knows exactly who he is. Under his baggy, likely secondhand clothes and miserably cheap haircut hide piercing eyes, sensuous lips, and a thin, capable body wholly sure of itself. On his first day as an intern in the company, Samuel successfully commands a violent, off-leash dog on the street (which Romy sees and can never quite shake). He brazenly challenges Romy in her own office in front of several impressionable newbies. He declares his intentions for her to be his mentor despite her not being an option. He is the kind of man she's almost never around, someone who sees her as a human on the same level as himself, for whom professional attire and wealthy status and fancy titles mean nothing next to the raw intimate dynamic between two human bodies attracted to each other. He is the kind of man she wants. He is the kind of man she fantasizes about. He is absolutely not a man she can have.

And yet she almost unconsciously finds herself magnetically pulled to him. During their initial mentorship meeting, Samuel quite readily observes that she seems to want to be told what to do. It's a horrifying and deeply erotic moment, one that reveals everything we need to know about these two characters. We've all met someone who not only reads us like a book but speaks that which we cannot ourselves admit. It feels like love, and it is decidedly not love. But Romy chooses to lean in, despite her repeated verbal protestations. Kidman's brilliance is on full display here, as she attempts to disguise her arousal and interest as being shocked and insulted, unwilling to say "no" but unable to say "yes." He's an intern, and as such, the least likely person to perceive her in this way; she has no ready defense for it. Meanwhile, Dickinson isn't being manipulative or predatory; he's shooting straight and calling it like he sees it. Later in the film, he'll describe their affair as if they were children, stopping himself before detailing their trial-and-error adventures in sexuality's darker regions. He's no Christian Grey. This isn't Secretary. If anything, it's more like Little Children.

Romy becomes addicted to their sexual affair, tethering herself to him via cell phone while starting to lose touch with her family and her work. We gather that this kind of sex -- not the sneaking around part, but rather the explicitly consensual and also experimental, kinky parts -- is like nothing she's ever experienced with another man. Samuel literally has to explain consent to her, and one of the most shocking parts of the film is that he's completely right. He is not, in any way, a predator.

Well, "not any way" might be a bit far. After all, it takes two to tango, and he's just as communicative via phone as she is. Perhaps more so, as their explicit dynamic is one in which Samuel dominates and Romy submits. While the marketing of this film will surely interest the masses who think Fifty Shades of Grey is hot (and I'm here to tell you: it's not, and it's not healthy), I'm hopeful that people take Babygirl for what it is and not what they crudely hope it might be. Sex in American cinema has been in a bit of a dry spell for a while now, which I actually appreciate, because I hope it means we've worn out the bad sex and started developing an interest in good sex. This might be unlikely, given the boom in popularity of almost exclusively awful smut in written literature, but this film makes the case for good eroticism on screen. Samuel definitely goes after what he wants, and it doesn't stop him from crossing personal boundaries -- one scene, when he materializes at Romy's house and socializes with her family, is one of the film's most disturbing despite its remarkably tame outcome -- but he's no Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction. 

More importantly, Reijn never lets the film be about sex for the sake of sex. It's never as explicit as I expected it to be, and never crosses any new thresholds of what we've seen before. If anything, its explicit thrills are contained to the close-ups of Kidman and Dickinson as they stare into each other's eyes while playing psychological power games. Dickinson often laughs during their encounters because it's new and weird for him too; Kidman often lurches from angrily indignant to coyly sassy to ecstatically relieved because her character has no mature way to handle the nervous onslaught of her sensations. Samuel treats sex, even with an older married woman, as a fact of life and an opportunity for heightened experience (not for human connection, which is a fascinating character trait). Romy treats sex as an obsessive compulsion to be entertained and controlled before it derails her, which she knows in paradoxical tension it will almost certainly do.

The acting will receive accolades as well as most popular and critical attention. And it is more than worthy. But Reijn's writing and direction deserve just as much, if not more. Romy's residual trauma is implied and never explained, just as Samuel's life is largely left mysterious. There are no frank discussions of what we might call hot topics like sadomasochism, cheating, or even polyamory, and though those elements are clearly present and meant to spur post-screening discussions, they aren't even explicitly depicted in any articulate way. I don't list these observations as the film's failings but as its victories in presenting itself on its own terms without pandering to sound bytes and buzzwords. Reijn trusts us to know what is going on and what to think about it without sharply defining anything for us to easily swallow and regurgitate later. And she even has fun with it, including pointed needle drops with "Never Tear Us Apart" (again, demonstrating that Fifty Shades just got it all wrong) and a laughably sudden but eventually moving moment underscored by George Michael's "Father Figure." If you had told me I'd ever find that song hot, I'd have laughed at you. But Reijn knowingly and playfully engages with us on these metatextual levels while encouraging us to feel all the weird, uncomfortable, and deeply troubling things humans do, can, and should experience in this weird world of bodies and feelings. But mostly bodies.