In erotic drama Nicole Kidman gives her ‘bravest and best performance in quite some time’

In Babygirl, which stars Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson, director Halina Reijn portrays a torrid office affair in all its “messy complexity” – it’s “moving” and “darkly funny”.

Picture an erotic drama starring Nicole Kidman as the sleekly dressed boss of a New York robotics firm. Her husband is a swarthy theatre director played by Antonio Banderas, but even though their love-making is as passionate as ever, she yearns for something more transgressive, so when a handsome and cocky young intern played by Harris Dickinson senses what’s on her mind, the pair of them are soon putting her job and her marriage at risk by making illicit use of the company’s soundproof offices.

That’s a fair description of Babygirl, a new film written, directed and produced by Halina Reijn, the maker of Bodies Bodies Bodies. But your mental image of its steamy goings-on might not match what’s on screen. What Reijn does so craftily is to examine what the situation might actually be like, in all its messy complexity. Bodies Bodies Bodies showed how a country-house murder mystery might play out if the protagonists were narcissistic numbskulls. Babygirl, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, is like a glossy 1980s Adrian Lyne thriller with the gloss scraped off to expose the mixed-up, contradictory human beings underneath.

None is more mixed-up than Kidman’s character, Romy. She is admired at work for being composed, driven, and nearly as robotic as the machines that zip around her company’s huge warehouses. At home, she appears to be a devoted wife to her husband, Jacob, and a loving mother to their two daughters. But Reijn wastes no time in revealing that after Romy has had sex with Jacob, she nips off to another room to watch domination-based pornography on her laptop. She spent her childhood in cults and communes, it turns out, which may have affected her views of what constitutes a healthy relationship.

Meanwhile, Dickinson’s character, Samuel, is neither a suave seducer nor a naive youngster, but a hard-to-pin-down combination of the two. Sometimes he’s almost psychotically confident and commanding, and sometimes he’s gauche and tongue-tied, often within the same scene. Once these two lost souls shuffle awkwardly into an affair, there is no smoky saxophone on the soundtrack and there are no lingering shots of smooth, shiny skin.

Reijn’s raw, jagged, indie-style film has all the scenes you would expect if Babygirl were a standard Hollywood neo-noir thriller – the intern turning up at the family’s weekend retreat, a co-worker finding out about the dalliance – but each time Reijn explores the undignified reality behind the glamour. Romy is seen having Botox injections, struggling to squeeze into a skin-tight dress, and interrupting an encounter in a hotel room because she is afraid she is going to pee on the carpet. Kidman’s lack of vanity in these scenes makes this her bravest and best performance in quite some time.

The shrewd screenplay also notes how times have changed since Michael Douglas’s characters kept having ill-advised flings in the 1980s and 1990s. Romy and Samuel’s dangerous liaison may be based on her doing everything he tells her to do, but he’s keen to discuss the company’s human-resources policies and the concept of consent before things go too far.

The lurching rhythm of their relationship keeps you on edge, but it’s also moving to see how tearful and confused Romy can be, and it’s darkly funny to see how she bluffs her way through her double life. Ultimately, though, Babygirl comes to seem genuinely romantic, because Romy and Samuel are fumbling their way towards a deeper understanding of each other. As uncomfortable as the film may be, it’s clear that Reijn loves and respects her damaged characters, even if they’re not sure of how they feel about themselves.