Babygirl (2024) Review
Babygirl (2024)
Director: Halina Reijn
Screenwriter: Halina Reijn
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas
Tech company CEO Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is walking down a rain-soaked New York City street toward her office building when she encounters an off-the-leash dog running toward her, aggressive and growling. Terrified, she stops, her eyes wide. Before anything can happen, the dog turns back toward a young man, who we will soon come to know as Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a new intern about to start his first day of work at Romy’s company. She watches him, kneeling on the opposite end of the street, his hand outstretched. The dog, seemingly vicious five seconds ago, now appears docile and immediately submits.
Perhaps the best character introduction in a film this year, this scene is also the perfect set up for the ever-evolving power dynamic between Romy and Samuel that we see play out in Babygirl, writer and director Halina Reijn’s third feature film. Fresh off the success of directing A24 horror satire Bodies Bodies Bodies, the actor-turned filmmaker returns with Babygirl to themes she first explored in her directorial debut, Instinct, an erotic thriller that follows a therapist and her obsession with an inmate at the prison she works for. Set in the strict hierarchical world of corporate America, Babygirl confronts the changing landscape of modern sexual politics through the eyes of a woman trying to claw her way out of the past.
Romy Mathis has everything. She has climbed to the top of the corporate ladder and is currently CEO of a robotics company. She is beloved by her employees, including her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde), who is eager to do some climbing of her own and create even more opportunities for women in STEM. Romy splits her time between her sleek apartment in the city and a secluded home on acres of land upstate, which she shares with her two young daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly), and her theater director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), with whom she has an active, healthy sex life.
However, mere moments into the film, this illusion is shattered. Romy’s perfect life is merely a performance – a mask she uses to hide her deepest sexual desires that she is too ashamed of to act upon. That changes when she meets Samuel, a young intern at her company who sees right through Romy’s carefully constructed persona to the vulnerability she tries so desperately to conceal. Though Romy tries at first to resist her attraction to him, they soon embark on a sexual affair that allows Romy to explore her sexually submissive fantasies. At the expense of possibly losing everything, Romy might just find out who she really is.
Born out of the darkened alleyways of film noir, erotic thrillers experienced their heyday in the 1980s and 90s during a time when there was a heightened sense of fear and curiosity about sex on screen and in our lives. Between the AIDS crisis and male anxieties over women’s changing roles in society, erotic thrillers of this time, like Basic Instinct, The Last Seduction, and Body Heat, explored power dynamics between men and women. In erotic thrillers, sex and danger existed side by side; you couldn’t have one without the other. Those who gave into pleasure always paid a high price.
Like the romantic comedy, erotic thrillers mostly died out a few decades ago, just as sensuality in general all but disappeared from major motion pictures. In recent years though, both genres have staged a modest comeback. The success of films like Anyone But You and Challengers seem to point toward a renewed hunger for sexy, earnest and erotic imagery on screen.
Babygirl exists in a kind of liminal space between erotic thrillers of the past and erotic thrillers that may exist in the future, with Reijn making a fairly successful case for the way these films might fit into modern society. The film is as much about Romy’s own sexual journey as it is about two different generations confronting and challenging each other’s relationship to sex, specifically when it comes to consent.
With Romy, we have a character who comes from a world of order and control. The setting of New York City perfectly speaks to her psyche, with Reijn highlighting uniform skyscrapers and the perfectly symmetrical lines of offices and apartments. Kidman’s face is constantly pinched into a tight smile that barely meets her eyes, as she runs her life the same way she runs her business, like a well-oiled machine. Kidman plays her like a woman coiled so tightly she’s constantly on the verge of snapping. Her costumes, designed by duo Bart and Kurt, also reveal her controlling and calculating nature, as well as the way it is obviously suffocating her – one lace turtle neck looks like it’s about to strangle her. To Romy, everything is about the optimization of performance. This is evident in the first moments of the film, where we see Romy straddling her husband, her face pointed toward us as she moans and writhes her way to an orgasm that seems too perfect to be real. Like the endless conveyor belts of her robotics company, that employs AI technology to make shipping faster and more automatic than ever before, Romy is completely removed from her own life and desires.
After having sex with her husband, Romy immediately goes into another room of the house where she lays on the floor and opens her laptop to watch BDSM porn and bring herself to an actual orgasm. She tries to stifle her guttural moans, biting into her hand to keep from crying out too loudly. In this moment, we see a glimpse of the real Romy – her primal self that she keeps under lock and key.
By comparison, Samuel is far more laid back and confident. His suit is just a little too big, his tie loose. He moves through the office with an ease that is immediately intriguing to Romy and also somewhat frustrating. Dickinson, who was most recently seen in wresting biopic The Iron Claw, switches back and forth between commanding and boyish, and his ability to flip that switch is endlessly intriguing to watch. Samuel’s blasé attitude toward authority is also a sign of Gen-Z’s response to workplace dynamics that have historically been unfair and exploitative.
Babygirl is a film about language and the ways in which we are taught to either vocalize or hide our own wants and desires. The script is not subtle and is at times quite on the nose when it comes to conversations around consent. It’s clear that Samuel has an understanding of this when Romy simply doesn’t, as made evident by her bewildered response when he tells her they can’t continue their dominant/submissive relationship unless she agrees to it. “That’s what consent is,” Samuel says, nearly exasperated by Romy’s naivety. Finally having the vocabulary to express her desires, Romy experiences a transformation. Realizing that in order to get what she wants out of sex, all she has to do is ask for it, is huge.
It is clear that Reijn’s focus here is Romy and her journey toward a more self-aware version of herself. However, Reijn’s script is certainly light on details when it comes to Romy’s life and her childhood, aside from a passing mention of her growing up in “cults and communes.” Because cults are all about control, it would have been interesting to further explore this part of Romy’s past and how it informs her thoughts about sex as an adult. Romy does say that she thought her desires had something to do with her traumatic childhood, but she then realized it was just who she is. But that doesn’t feel like a good enough answer. Samuel’s life feels equally shrouded in mystery. His moments of vulnerability ask more questions than they answer.
Despite this, Babygirl is refreshingly humorous, and Romy and Samuel’s relationship is marked by earnest fumbling and awkward beginnings. Both at first seem uncomfortable in their chosen roles, which leads to delightful moments of vulnerability, like when Samuel bursts out laughing after he tells Romy to get on all fours.
Because Reijn is so intent on giving Romy a satisfying ending, one of empowerment and growth, she neglects the more seedy and dangerous elements that have always been hallmarks of the erotic thriller genre. Characters in this genre usually end up ruined, women more often than men. But still, the danger is very real for both of them. And it’s that fear of discovery that creates an essential tension in erotic thrillers that Babygirl is lacking. Reijn isn’t interested in the consequences of an inappropriate workplace relationship, nor is she willing to truly ruin her characters. Even when Esme finds out about their affair, she doesn’t take the opportunity to destroy Romy. “I thought women in power would behave differently,” she tells Romy. That’s a really interesting idea, but it doesn’t go anywhere. In this way, Babygirl has more in common with 2002’s Secretary than it does with say, Fatal Attraction or even In the Cut, which does a wonderful job of subverting known tropes of the genre.
Spearheaded by two wonderfully vulnerable performances, including a potential career best for Kidman, Babygirl is an imperfect yet entertaining film that seeks to bridge the gap between generational divides when it comes to love and sex. An example of a genre going through obvious growing pains, Babygirl also signals a possible future in which we might actually figure out a way to make movies sexy again.
Score: 20/24
