Nicole Kidman Shines in the Otherwise Shallow Babygirl
It takes a particularly fearless and just plain technically skilled actress to play a convincing orgasm, and then follow it up with another, more intense version that throws into relief how fake the previous one actually was. Should it surprise anyone that the actress in question is Nicole Kidman? Rather than shrinking from difficult roles or acquiescing to Hollywood mores about what a middle-aged woman should be doing on screen, Kidman unblinkingly takes projects like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, working with more women filmmakers than almost any major star you can think of.
On top of that, Romy Mathis, the high-powered CEO Kidman plays here, seems designed to poke at certain aspects of Kidman’s image, on-screen and off. She’s the slightly chilly woman in charge (and a woman of means), as Kidman has played so often in the last decade; we also see her on the table getting served her rich-lady beauty treatments, including a round of what we can presume to be Botox, as Kidman has … well, you’re likely familiar with the speculation. Shortly thereafter, one of Romy’s daughters speaks with open contempt and disgust about what her mother does to herself. Romy, notably, keeps her cool. She seems to pride herself in doing so.
And yet: Maybe there’s a flip side to that control. On her way into the office one morning, on the streets of Manhattan, Romy encounters a dog, off-leash, running toward her and looking fierce. Seemingly out of nowhere, a young man named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) brings the dog to heel. He saves Romy from immediate physical distress, but leaves behind another kind: A realization, entirely on Kidman’s face, that she feels something more complicated and stirring than simple relief. It gets even less simple when she realizes that Samuel is starting as an intern at her robotics company.
Samuel’s introduction into Romy’s life is a striking scene to describe and to experience, but I’m not sure the staging actually makes much sense. The crowd of people gawking at the attacking dog, entirely ignored by Romy; the way the dog springs straight for her after tussling with another bystander; the fact that Samuel has just the right cookie to capture the animal’s attention … it’s a confluence of events that’s more dreamlike than logical progression. But Reijn, who previously made the very funny horror trifle Bodies Bodies Bodies, favors a less stylized approach. No one tell the A24 marketing department, or the movie’s end credits shifting from hot pink to purple to blue, but Babygirl is actually kinda basic.
Certainly it maintains a provocative uncertainty at first. Samuel, immediately sensing (why?) Romy’s awakening, her desire to sexually submit, before she’s spoken a word to him, starts to push and prod at her buttons. He asks a semi-impudent question at an intern gathering. He signs up for her to mentor him, despite her being seemingly unaware that she’s part of the mentorship program. (Is the movie implying that he somehow rigged the assignment? Or is she feigning ignorance, trying to get out of it?) At a work gathering, the interns sequestered from the executives, he sends over a glass of milk. Not one to back down from a challenge, she drinks the whole thing. “Good girl,” he whispers to her on his way out.
Is this sexy? Well, sex is as personal as comedy, so it doesn’t entirely matter. What the movie needs to do is key us into Romy’s desire, whether or not we share it. Kidman and Reijn do this very well, especially early in the film. In that first scene with the dual orgasms, we see how Romy’s husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) has a tenderness that, in sex, she attempts to manage or minimize–a too-rare dramatization of sexual incompatibilities between two people who clearly do love each other. Yet as the movie goes on, and Romy eventually consummates her halting but intense attraction to Samuel’s dominance, the movie seems uncertain of how to proceed: She likes to be dominated; now what? The answer, unfortunately, is largely melodrama, painted with messy naturalism. At least the understylized Bodies Bodies Bodies had some killer punchlines to fall back on.
And for all of Babygirl’s relative restraint, aspects of the movie still manage to look as glossy and flimsy as a catalog. The headquarters of an automation company that appears to provide tech to Amazon-like warehouses somehow looks more like a boutique law firm – or, say, the posh digs of a mini-major film studio like A24, where some of it was indeed actually shot. The supporting characters are reduced to types: the good, obedient daughter and the more reckless, mouthy one; the earnestly ambitious assistant (Sophie Wilde, in a particularly thankless role within the world of the movie and outside of it, too); the sensitive-artist husband who doesn’t get that his wife might want to be fucked from behind at some point. Hell, even Samuel doesn’t have much inner life; Dickinson plays him with quiet bravado and some interesting notes of hesitation, none of which seems to conceal much of anything in particular. The movie is all Kidman.
To be fair, she’s an ideal choice to build an entire movie around. But anyone primed for a sort of quarter-century-later, similarly Christmas-set spiritual follow-up to Eyes Wide Shut, this time centering a woman’s point of view, or a flipped dynamic from the boss-employee S&M of Secretary, may come away unfulfilled. There’s little menace or mystery to Babygirl; Romy’s desires are mysterious to her, at least at first, but not particularly to us, especially not after she offhands a convenient bit of backstory about her childhood growing up in “communes and cults.” The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.
Director: Halina Reijn
Writer: Halina Reijn
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly
Release date: December 25, 2024
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.