In the third feature film from Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn (Instinct, Bodies Bodies Bodies), Nicole Kidman plays Romy Mathis, the CEO of Tensile, a shipping automation company that has been a pioneer in the use of robotics. Romy’s home life is itself somewhat robotic: Though her high-pressure job absorbs most of her waking hours, she also looks the picture of chic femininity as she poses for professional holiday portraits with her loving theater-director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and their two daughters, one teenaged and one in middle school. As the movie opens, Romy and Jacob are engaged in what appears to be volcanically satisfying sex—but as soon as he goes to sleep, she rushes to the other room to masturbate to a BDSM porn video. Clearly a crucial piece is missing in the life of this Vogue-cover-ready girlboss.
Outside her Manhattan office one day, Romy spots a young man with a quietly authoritative manner calming a runaway dog in the street before returning it to its owner. Soon after, she realizes he is one of her company’s incoming group of interns, a lanky twentysomething named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who immediately throws his boss off balance by asking a challenging question about the company’s commitment to sustainability. Later, Samuel insists on listing Romy as his official mentor, even though she maintains that she isn’t part of the firm’s mentoring program. In their first meeting, as she’s talking about what it’s like to wield professional power, he offers a laconic but pointed counter-opinion: “I think you like to be told what to do.” This casual assertion unlocks something in the tightly wound Romy. Within days, she and Samuel are engaged in a torrid affair with a lightly sadomasochistic charge. They meet up in hotel rooms (or sometimes, dangerously, in conference rooms at the Tensile office), where he orders her to perform submissive roles: crawling to him on all fours to beg for a piece of candy, lapping up milk like a cat.
Romy and Samuel’s first awkward, then steamy, sex games might be dismissed as plain vanilla by those with wider-ranging tastes, but their comparative mildness is part of Reijn’s point. What Babygirl wants to explore is not the extreme edge of dominance and submission but the intense shame experienced by some women—especially, perhaps, straight married women of a certain age—at the notion of having any kinks at all. In a scene where Romy tries to be honest with her husband about her desires (while withholding such key pieces of information as “I’m fucking my intern”), she tearfully confesses to “dark, dark thoughts” and calls herself a “monster” and “not normal.” What the fling with Samuel offers Romy is not only sexual gratification but a glimpse into a world where such role-playing is only one of many perfectly ordinary forms of human behavior. Reijn’s screenplay suggests that the distinction between Romy’s and Samuel’s approaches to sex is in part generational: As a Gen Z polymorph, he is more open than she is to same-sex encounters—in a nightclub scene, he caresses a shirtless man on the dance floor—and later on he admonishes a Gen X–aged character who frames Romy’s submissive role-playing as antifeminist that “that’s an outdated idea about sexuality.”
What keeps Babygirl from feeling preachy or self-serious is the film’s sense of humor and playfulness when it comes to matters of sex. Yes, Romy is playing a perilous game with both her marriage and her professional reputation; to the extent this movie could be classed as an “erotic thriller,” as some critics have dubbed it, the suspense comes from waiting to see whether and how she will face the consequences of her messy personal choices. But suspense plays a relatively small part in what’s ultimately a kind of erotic comedy: As Samuel comes up with new ways to turn Romy on by bossing her around, he often has to suppress a sneaky smile. There’s a hint, in a thematic thread that could have been better developed, that Samuel’s quest to free Romy from a lifetime of repression might be motivated by something less noble than the desire to be a sexual liberator. At the height of their secret affair, he finds excuses to show up at her house and chat with her family, all the while reminding her in private that he’s not interested in making a middle-aged mother his exclusive girlfriend. Do the cat-and-mouse games the two play appeal to him because of his own kinks, or because of the way they reverse the real-life power dynamic with his boss? When he appears to laugh off a suggestion that he’s the victim of workplace abuse, is Samuel in denial, or bluffing, or genuinely so secure in his own sexual power that he feels no loss of agency? Our final glimpse of the character onscreen is in a fantasy sequence seen from Romy’s point of view, shutting us out from Samuel’s interiority. It’s a choice that’s in line with the movie’s focus on female desire, but Samuel’s opacity keeps him tantalizingly out of reach, as much for the audience as for his pining lover. Dickinson, an English actor whose breakout role was in 2017’s Beach Ratshas an air of reserve and self-possession that makes you wonder what he’s hiding.
Reijn’s filmmaking is not groundbreaking, but it’s slick and stylish, with a soundtrack full of cheeky needle-drops: INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” for a falling-in-lust montage, George Michael’s “Father Figure” for a memorable scene in which Samuel dances shirtless in a posh hotel room, glass of whiskey in hand, while Romy looks on entranced. While this isn’t Kidman’s first time playing a brittle Type-A woman whose attempt at external perfection leaves her frayed around the edges—think of To Die For or Big Little Lies—the actress commits harder than she ever has to a character whose deep insecurity makes her sympathetic even when she’s far from likable. In one scene, standing naked before her lover, Romy repeatedly and tearfully denies his sincere compliment: “You’re beautiful.” “No, I’m not. I’m not.” If even someone inhabiting the celestially gorgeous body of Nicole Kidman can feel this degree of discomfort and dysmorphia, Babygirl suggests, maybe we should all just knock it off with the shame already and find a way, however comically bumbling, to let our freak flags fly.
