Romy (Nicole Kidman) has it all, but she doesn’t have good orgasms.
More precisely, she doesn’t have not self-inflicted orgasms, despite the fact that she is married to Antonio Banderas (who’s playing a prominent theater director). Romy is the CEO of a company that produces robots (there is a symbolism here that’s hard to miss), and this position comes (pun unintended) with a bunch of additional baggage that’s been building up Romy’s image for years – to the point where she clearly struggles to really figure out her identity.
Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who first appears as a nice, helpful guy who sort of protects Romy from an agressive dog, and then reappears as the newest intern addition to her team. Unlike Romy, Samuel definitely knows what he wants, so he doesn’t waste any time requesting her direct mentorship, which in turn quickly turns into a mentorship with a very different power dynamic.
In a way, it almost feels like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl was conceived and created as an art piece meant to cause ruckus, provoke discussions and at times, be outright hated. The line between fascination and resentment is always thin in this kind of cases, and it also seems like personal projections and experiences might play a major role in how one perceives a movie like this one.
Representing the film as a kind of an erotic thriller also puts it a precarious position, since there’s nothing here that would really fit this genre canon. Sure, any story involving an affair is a bit of a thriller by default – the suspense of potentially being figured out is always there at the very least. Barring that though, there are blessedly no didactic moral lessons about consequences in here.
So going in expecting some good old pet rabbit massacres, intense stalkings or ice pick stabbings might not benefit the viewing experience when it comes to Reijn’s film. Even the erotic part of Babygirl comes off as something a bit unexpected.
While Nicole Kidman’s and Harris Dickinson’s scenes are exciting in all the right ways, they are also deliberately devoid of anything that might be described as sensationalism. In a way, Reijn here does what many filmmakers in the immediate aftermath of the Hays Code era strived to do – she sets out to show graphic depictions of sex not for the sake of merely showing it or shocking anyone, but to actually normalize it as a natural, almost banal activity.
In this sense, Babygirl is the opposite of an erotic film in the best of ways, as its characters not only have sex (a lot) but do the unimaginable: they talk about it. They speak about intimacies and expectations, about boundaries and limits, and they also do it a lot. It’s in this context that the age gap is most pronounced between Romy and Samuel. Dickinson’s character represents the generation that is used to talking about things, so Samuel naturally leads the process, but Kidman’s heroine with the gradual change in her is the natural emotional center of the story and the main point of reference for the audience.
Reijn’s film ends up not being about an affair at all since its main relationship is between Romy and Romy – as she’s finally getting to know herself. In a way, it’s reminiscent of a Christmas classic from Kidman's filmography – Eyes Wide Shut, but where Kubrick’s film showed the inward odyssey to one's desires as potentially dark and scary, Babygirl is much more optimistic.
Its festive affirmation is that not only you can have a healthy and productive relationship with yourself – if you’re lucky, that relationship can also be pretty damn sexy.
Babygirl is now playing in select theaters via A24 Films.