TIFF 2024: Nicole Kidman Discovers True Lust in the Excellent and Surprising ‘Babygirl’

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 13, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 13, 2024 |

Romy (Nicole Kidman) has a wonderful life. She’s the CEO of a successful robotics company, one of the few women in the top job of her field. She’s beautiful, driven, impeccably polished, and has a loving family, including her doting husband (Antonio Banderas.) Babygirl, the erotic drama directed by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), even opens with the loving devoted spouses mid-coitus. It all seems blissful. But there’s a problem, evident when Romy gets out of bed after her hubby has done his business, goes into another room, and finishes herself off while watching daddy kink porn: Romy has never orgasmed while having sex with him. Not even once.

Can you have a successful and fulfilled marriage if that one big problem is forever looming overhead? Romy seems dissatisfied but accepting until she lays eyes on Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a new intern at her company. She’s drawn to him immediately, and he can sense something in her that nobody else can. He can take control of her, make her do what he wants, and finally satisfy her in the way her body has been demanding for two decades.

Babygirl has, perhaps inevitably, been compared both to Fifty Shades of Grey and Secretary, the two most prominent portrayals of BDSM in mainstream American cinema (for better or worse.) The former is notoriously confused about how consent and kink actually works while the latter, which is one of my favourite films, is happy to put the tricky power dynamics aside in favour of a love story. Babygirl is obsessed with power, pleasure, and how the two are often inextricably entwined. This feels far less romanticized than either but also more morally complex. It’s sure to inspire its fair share of Discourse but Reijn’s take on the hunt for feminine pleasure is proudly brazen, a straitlaced burlesque performance with a hint of pre-Hayes Code screwball at its heart.

Romy is used to routines, to boundaries and PR speak. She gives corporate speeches at her job where an assistant tells her to cut words that sound too negative, leading to quotes that feel as robotic as the machines her company creates. When Samuel asks forward questions at the intern meet-and-greet, Romy’s assistant shuts him down, but Romy is beguiled by his assertiveness. He’s no Casanova, nor is he a naive intern from the kind of pornos Romy likes to watch. His suits are rumpled, he has f*ckboi tattoos, and carries cookies in his pockets. Harris Dickinson plays him as wily yet opaque. For every moment where he seems almost tongue-tied by his own dominant desires, there’s another where he’s borderline sociopathic in his confident control over his older boss. Their every interaction has you on edge. Will it be sexy as hell? Weird? Funny? It’s truly unpredictable.

Babygirl was frequently described pre-release as an erotic thriller, but don’t come here expecting sexy sax solos and steamy car windows. Reijn certainly has the talent for making that kind of film. She’s comfortable in spheres of money and control, and she can shoot a sex scene like nobody’s business. But many of those beats that are familiar parts of the genre — the hotel visits, the lover turning up at the family home, the colleague who finds out the truth — are not shot with the sensual sheen of a Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne film. Infidelity can be thrilling but those highs are always punctuated by an indignant low or moment of vulnerability that terrifies Romy. It hints at a turn into thriller territory then immediately laughs it off. As steamy as this film is, it’s also about how navigating sex is clumsy and awkward. In one of the hottest scenes, wherein Romy has her first orgasm with Samuel, she’s so overwhelmed by the sensation that she worries she’s about to accidentally pee on the floor. Trying to figure out how to have an extra-marital dominant-submissive affair on the fly is just plain weird.

It’s no surprise that Kidman is excellent here. She’s one of our best and nerviest actresses, a true risk taker in a business that is hesitant to give women truly abrasive roles. She might be the only true A-List Hollywood actress whose roles could be played by Isabelle Huppert (one wonders if Huppert has thought so herself; she headed the jury at the Venice Film Festival that rewarded Kidman with the best actress award for this performance.) Romy is a Boss but she seems so keen to make herself small to Samuel, ducking her head like a bashful child or staring at him with a desperation to be looked at in return. She knows she’s the one in the wrong on paper, the older woman and corporate superior having an affair with the intern, but is so tightly wound and exhausted by her own pent-up desires that she crumbles like a breadstick when Samuel suggests that he’s really the one with the power. It’s a remarkably vanity-free performance, one that even pokes fun at the Kidman image at times (Romy’s extended healthcare and therapy sessions include botox injections, which one of her daughters claims makes her look awful.)

In the era of the endless discourse about sex scenes in films and their perceived necessity, Babygirl is a work that prioritizes not simply the sensation of pleasure but the myriad issues surrounding one’s attainment of it. This isn’t a film that moralizes on its characters’ actions or punishes its heroine for wanting something beyond vanilla sex with Antonio Banderas. Reijn acutely captures the dizzying, oft-regrettable but frequently rewarding experience of falling in lust. What is love? Not this!

Babygirl had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It will be released in the U.S. on December 25th.