Screw delayed gratification: Babygirl opens with the sound of a woman moaning in apparent pleasure before its vanity card even appears. (I get it, I like A24 movies too.) Then its first frame shows her enthusiastically riding her husband before they collapse onto the sheets and embrace, whispering sweet nothings, having been mutually satisfied… or at least that’s what he thinks. As her partner falls asleep, the woman discreetly slinks into the adjoining room, fires up her laptop, and masturbates to pornography, muffling her own gasps to avoid waking anyone. The implication is obvious: Whatever she’s getting in bed ain’t cutting it. She needs more.
That sense of need—of pure, bottomless craving—is what animates Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s strange, messy, intriguing new psychodrama. It’s a movie about the paralyzing quality of desire—how coveting something forbidden can upend even the most carefully cultivated lives. The body may want what it wants, but the brain knows that our wants can get us into trouble.
For Romy Mathis (a game Nicole Kidman), no such disruptions will be tolerated. The CEO of a robotics company called Tensile, she has sculpted her existence with the same sort of whirring precision embodied in her mechanized products. She has two charming children with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a successful theater director. She owns a swanky Manhattan loft along with a handsome summer estate. She receives routine collagen injections to maintain her flawless appearance. She is always confident, always in control, never yielding to anyone else’s authority—which is ironic, given that she’s secretly a submissive.
Jacob may be oblivious to this facet of his wife’s persona, but it quickly crosses the radar of Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a tall and handsome Tensile intern who—to his boss’ initial annoyance—selects Romy as his official mentor. That a bigwig like Romy would even learn the names of her unpaid employees, much less personally counsel one of them, is rather implausible, but Reijn isn’t concerned with corporate realism. In fact, it’s possible to read Babygirl as an arch satire of soul-sucking capitalism: the inane promotional jargon, the virtue signalling, the transactional rot that festers beneath every interaction. (Want that promotion? You’d better have some leverage.) In this regard, the movie is unpersuasive, gesturing toward in-vogue topics (#MeToo, female empowerment) without committing to them.
Reijn exhibited a similarly vague cynicism in her prior feature, Bodies Bodies Bodies, which turned a house full of high-strung Zoomers into the site of a murder mystery. But where that thriller treated its volatile youths as vapid, paper-thin caricatures, here Reijn and Kidman endeavor to give Romy real depth. Her life is a vertiginous construction, a teetering house of cards, and the unusually perceptive Samuel instantly sees through her façade. “You think I’m power-hungry?” she asks him during their initial sit-down. “No,” he replies, “I think you like being told what to do.” The look on Kidman’s face in response to this casual pronouncement—a blend of shock, fear, and longing—speaks volumes in its silence.
In terms of plot, Babygirl is fairly predictable. Shortly after this fraught encounter, Romy and Samuel will strike up a clandestine relationship—whether you term it an affair, a treachery, or an abusive episode might tip your hand as to your own sexual politics—that allows her to indulge in the subservient appetites she’s long nurtured but has always kept buttoned. Things will inevitably go awry—lines crossed, threats uttered, hearts broken—endangering both Romy’s marriage and her position atop Tensile’s hierarchy. It’s Fatal Attraction by way of Fifty Shades of Grey, albeit with less stupidity and fewer dead rabbits.
This trajectory isn’t especially suspenseful, despite Kidman’s persuasive anxiety. What makes Babygirl interesting is its specific and peculiar depiction of the characters’ imbroglio, which it portrays as awkward and faltering as well as strenuous and passionate. The movie’s best and most memorable scene occurs when Romy and Samuel first meet at a hotel, where they finally have the opportunity to consummate their mutual (if oppositional) attraction. Their foreplay is curiously self-conscious: Samuel issues harsh commands before laughing at his own belligerence; Romy grimaces and rolls her eyes, even as she feels an invisible urge to obey. You can almost perceive them learning each other’s turn-ons in real time in a way cinema rarely explores, so that when Romy finally and fully surrenders, the pleasure she experiences seems genuine. (On this count, Kidman’s inhabitation of the role is total.) The whole thing is odd, and oddly spellbinding.
Reign stages that sequence with an appropriate lack of fuss, letting her actors amplify the tension via long takes rather than cutting away. I wish she’d demonstrated a bit more restraint elsewhere, because her technique tends to feel restless and overheated. Her camera tends to hover, and while her actors know how to hold a close-up, the film’s aesthetic is often sloppy. Reijn delivers the obligatory montages of putative ecstasy—fingers shoved in mouths, bodies strewn on the floor and slammed against walls—but none of them compares to the simple scene at happy hour where Samuel orders Romy a tall glass of milk and she, in a gesture of either capitulation or defiance, downs it a single gulp. And while the soundtrack supplies a few bangers (Robyn, INXS), the score (by Cristobal Tapia de Veer) is needlessly assaultive, with constant percussion and breathy vocalizing. It’s as though Reijn lacked faith in the integrity of her material and felt compelled to amp it up to ensure it reached the requisite level of provocation.
I’ve seen Babygirl described as an erotic thriller, implying a degree of excitement that the movie never achieves. This may be intentional; to Reijn’s credit, she avoids shrill mayhem in her third act, instead providing a resolution that’s both overly tidy and admirably hazy. It’s hard to tell whether the picture is meant to be happy or sad, and that uncertainty is personified in Kidman’s performance, which manages to be frenzied, fastidious, and elusive all at once. Romy may just be simulating orgasms with her husband, but when it comes to incarnating a complex and fully realized woman, Kidman isn’t faking it.
Grade: B-
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.