Photo: Niko Tavernise/A24
The most seductive sight Babygirl has to offer is Harris Dickinson, wearing pleated dress pants and no shirt, lifting a robe-clad Nicole Kidman in his arms while George Michael’s “Father Figure” blasts on the soundtrack. I don’t know that I can do justice to the disorienting appeal of this image. There are plenty of more straightforwardly sexy moments in writer-director Halina Reijn’s movie, which is about a corporate CEO named Romy (Kidman) who embarks on a BDSM-tinged affair with an intern named Samuel (Dickinson) — moments when the pair are so worked up they fuck in a restroom, or when Samuel orders Romy to take off her gorgeous column dress while he looks on, or when the camera holds on Romy’s shifting expressions as she comes apart during her first non-solo orgasm. But nothing gets at the unabashed nature of Babygirl’s eroticism like that shot of Samuel tenderly cradling his lover like a child after having spent long hours holed up in a hotel room together indulging in lovemaking and games of dominance and submission. It feels startlingly private, two people discovering something about themselves in real time while we get the singular privilege of watching from the other side of the screen.
Babygirl is being billed in some corners as an erotic thriller, though it doesn’t insist on the moral consequences that have traditionally been just as central to the subgenre as the steamy clinches. Reijn, late of the underwhelming cool-kid horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, is a Dutch filmmaker who’s essentially on a cultural safari through the remnants of American puritanism, and the only sexual hangups she explores are the ones Romy herself has internalized. Babygirl never bothers to genuinely reckon with the damage that could be wrought by the head of a company having an illicit affair with a junior employee. Instead, it approaches its own potentially sordid scenario with a giddy deliriousness. If 2024 has turned out to be the year of the cougar at the movies — Kidman herself has now been paired twice with a leading man over two decades younger — what Babygirl has to offer toward the trend is not a tale of punishment, but an adventure into self-discovery that’s unabashedly indulgent but always surprising.
Romy is an executive of the post–Lean In era, one who wears her hair in tendrils and her power lightly. “It’s a positive to be vulnerable, not a negative,” an underling tells her when she uses the word “weakness” in a corporate video, and if Romy doesn’t entirely buy this, she nevertheless takes the note. She has it all — the high-flying job, the loving husband (theater director Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas), and the kids (Vaughan Reilly and Esther McGregor as daughters Nora and Isabel, respectively). If the contradictions are getting to her, having to be authoritative while also always being approachable, and firm while also always being soft, it doesn’t show until Samuel shows up in the office and sparks something inside her she’s previously tried to shut down. What first lights her up is, amusingly, the way he takes command of an aggressive dog who’s gotten away from her owner — his ease, his confidence, and the way he says “good girl.” Kidman’s been on a run of playing overachieving matrons lately, in roles from Big Little Lies to the upcoming The Perfect Couple. What’s gratifying about her role in this film is that she starts from that place, then banks so wildly in another direction that she seems perpetually shocked by herself.
The idea that someone’s needs in the bedroom might diverge from who they are and how they behave outside it isn’t radical, but Babygirl approaches it as though the concept were brand new, its lovers figuring out what they like as they go. Dickinson is often cast as aloof beauties, objects of desire rather than characters who actively go after what they want, but Babygirl brings him down to earth. Samuel is old enough to work in a bar on the side while being young enough to get an internship at Romy’s warehouse automation company (Babygirl approaches its setting with the endearing vagueness of someone who’s read a single Wikipedia entry on New York corporate culture). He’s no Christian Grey, though he already has a better sense of what he wants than Romy does. Their early scenes together are fumbling and funny, in part because neither of them knows what they’re doing, but even more than that, because Romy gets drawn in by her own desires, only to turn around and act outraged at what’s happening.
The generational difference between Babygirl’s lovers isn’t just an act of provocation — Romy’s a product of her era, having had to learn to be one of the boys, and then to figure out what it means to be a leader who’s a woman, and written in all the accrued scar tissue on her heart from those experiences is a certainty that what she wants is shameful and degrading. Babygirl isn’t really a romance, and it’s better for it, even if the film ends on a note that feels a little too neat for the vivid messiness of everything that comes before. It’s a self-love story, and part of that discovery is that it’s okay to let yourself be small for a while. More than okay — it might turn out to be pretty hot.