Babygirl (2024) Review: Nicole Kidman’s Fearless Performance Dominates Halina Reijn’s Provocative, Though Sometimes Muted Erotic Thriller
Nicole Kidman is no stranger to erotic thrillers with Eyes Wide Shut being one of them but Babygirl sees the 57-year-old actress tackles one of the most challenging roles of her storied career. The role which earned her a Golden Globe nomination but unfortunately snubbed for the Oscars, even though she did receive top honour for Volpi Cup in the Best Actress category at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
She plays Romy, a middle-aged CEO of a robotics process automation company who marries a theatre-director husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and has two daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly). Despite her successful career, her sex life is mundane. This can be seen right from the opening sequence when she masturbates while watching adult content on her laptop after she has dissatisfied sex with her husband.
One morning while on her way walking to her office building, she is immediately smitten by a young, handsome stranger who manages to calm a barking and hostile dog that scared a lot of passers-by. That stranger in question turns out to be one of the recruits named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) in the internship programme at her company. There’s something about Samuel’s personality who seems to have his eyes on her, particularly the way he exercises control over her both directly and indirectly from telling her to cut down on coffee to daring her to down a glass of milk at the bar.
Power dynamics and asserting dominance are recurring themes here in Babygirl as Samuel insists on picking Romy as his mentor, even though she feels hesitant at first. But Samuel is the kind of persistent person who knows that deep down, it’s hard to say no to his request. His appearance and dominant approach have somehow triggered her sexual reawakening and all the initial hesitations coming from her soon turn into an inevitable desire.
So it begins an illicit affair between Romy and Samuel, leading to the movie’s most provocative moment in a hotel room where he controls her what to do including a certain milk scene. Bodies Bodies Bodies‘ Halina Reijn, who also wrote the screenplay, incorporates the honest depiction of dominance and submission a.k.a. D/s, even though the scene is still executed within the boundaries of the mainstream cinema of an erotic thriller genre. NC-17, this is not.
Most of the sex scenes are frankly mediocre, especially given all the hype that has been generated before the release of Babygirl. Part of me wondering what Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne would do with Babygirl‘s risqué subject matter if either of them directs the movie instead. Despite the bold theme, the biggest problem here lies in Reijn’s somewhat stubbornly persistent approach to keeping the stakes on a leash rather than raising them accordingly.
Still, the movie benefits from Kidman’s fearless performance which combines her sublime acting and willingness to delve into the physical and psychological exploration of a D/s affair. While she mostly steals the show in Babygirl, her younger co-star Harris Dickinson equally delivers solid support as the domineering Samuel while Antonio Banderas rounds up the cast as Jacob, the confused and unfortunate husband who has been kept in the dark about his wife, Romy’s affair and sexual needs.
Babygirl also boasts sleek aesthetics and alluring camerawork that reminds me of the visual styling of the ’80s and ’90s era of erotic thrillers. It’s far from the great erotic thriller that I hoped to be but the overall above-average performances, particularly Nicole Kidman’s scene-stealing lead role and Reijn’s intriguing psychological evaluation of inner desire, authority and the age-gap toxic relationship between an older woman and a younger man.
