Review of “Babygirl” with Nicole Kidman

In the cinema, the month of January spoils us. After frenzied international promotion and an acting award for Nicole Kidman, Babygirldirected by Halina Reijn, arrives in French cinemas this Wednesday January 15, 2025.

Why do we love Babygirl ? Three-point answer.

Sensual thriller

While she has everything, as the saying goes, to be happy, Romy, a powerful woman of power, sends everything aside – work and family – for the beautiful eyes of an intern with breathtaking charm. In this cruel game of seduction mixed with sadomasochistic relationships, the real world falters in favor of an army of erotic delusions and transgressions.

Star on fire

Awarded the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival, Kidman seems levitating in this role, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes tormented by guilt and shame.

Twenty-five years later Eyes Wide Shut, where, as the wife of Tom Cruise, we glimpsed his fantasies, Babygirl offers the total reverse view of this feminine desire, facing the atomic bomb Harris Dickinson (revealed by Without filter).

Moral puzzle

Beyond the ethical question posed by this relationship – between a CEO and her superior – the film raises a thousand questions about the compatibility of the heroine’s dreams of humiliation with female emancipation.

Has the submission of women imposed by the patriarchal system for centuries gone so far as to infiltrate her imagination? Or is masochism the hottest of freedoms?