Romy Mathis owns a duplex apartment in the city and a big house in the country. She has a doting husband, two adorable daughters and a gilded career as the CEO of Tensile, a non-specific “robot business” that runs a successful warehouse delivery scheme. Romy – in the parlance of a women’s glossy magazine – has it all, which naturally means that she wants something else, something more. Before long she has embarked on a perilous affair with her office intern, jumping him in the gents to the strains of INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart.
Romy is played by Nicole Kidman, whose bright, bold performance nonetheless carries a top-note of distress, as though she is not entirely convinced by everything she’s signed up for. She is the star of Halina Reijn’s film, which premieres here in Venice and might have been this year’s Tár – that other big drama about a powerful woman laid low – were it not so superficially pleased with itself, so thrilled by its own daring. Babygirl has some useful and occasionally provocative things to say about inter-office dynamics and sexual desire, but it delivers them with the clipped, perky professionalism of an annual corporate presentation.
The film opens with an orgasm and closes with another, although it turns out that the first climax was faked, because Romy has never been truly satisfied by her spouse. She confesses to having “dark thoughts”, masturbates compulsively to her laptop and hungers for an adventure to get her out of her rut. This explains why she’s so drawn to Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a twentysomething gofer at Tensile’s New York office whose puckish self-assurance hangs just the right side of insolence. The intern wants her to mentor him; he wants whatever he can get. Arriving at work one morning, Romy sees him taming a wild dog on the street. Just maybe, she thinks, he can tame her as well.
Like Romy’s first climax, the picture is a burlesque, a performance; expertly done but suspect at its core. Reijn, a Dutch-born director now based in New York, enjoyed a breakout hit with the punchy Bodies Bodies Bodies in 2022, but this film is less satisfying, and at times rather silly. Now Romy and Samuel are locked in a torrid and toxic affair. He is feeding her saucers of milk to the strains of George Michael’s Father Figure, while her poor husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), is left wrangling the kids and trying to direct his latest off-Broadway show. The power balance shifts. Samuel starts to think he’s the boss. He points out that he has a crucial hold over Romy and that all it would take is one phone call to instantly end her career. “Does it turn you on when I say that?” he asks with a grin – and she’s so spun around by this point that yes, it probably does.
Is it a spoiler to mention that Romy and Samuel’s adventure doesn’t necessarily end well? There is no neat happy ending for our lust-struck lovers; just more mess, more stress, and eventually, a screaming row beside the Christmas tree. Reijn’s drama deserves credit for its lack of cheap moralising and suggests that even the most reckless affair can bring unforeseen benefits. But it’s too little, too late, and for all its excited carnality and seesawing power struggles, the film’s thrills feel machine-tooled and vacuum-packed. Babygirl rolls off the track looking almost as neat and anonymous as a box from Tensile’s upstate delivery warehouse.
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