Babygirl

In addition to constantly surprising audiences with her formidable acting prowess and bold choices of material, Nicole Kidman has been tantalizing viewers for four decades. From her early Australian films like Dead Calm and Flirting to highbrow dramas about sex and marriage like Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, to contemporary features exploring sexual power dynamics like The Beguiled and Bombshell. So, a serious erotic drama written and directed by a European woman in which Kidman plays a middle-aged corporate CEO who jeopardizes her career and family by getting into a BDSM relationship with her much younger intern is a more than intriguing prospect.

Babygirl is a movie that sets out to explore the sexuality of a powerful woman who gets turned on by being placed in situations of powerlessness. Unfortunately, the script and direction by former actor and Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn barely differentiate themselves from the surface-obsessed trifles Zalman King served up in the mid-80s and '90s. The film clearly wants to be a contemporary commentary on how the nuances of sexual desire don't always fit conveniently into modern workplace policies and societal rules concerning power dynamics. Unfortunately, so little time is spent in the actual workplace that these ideas never gestate beyond abstract concepts, and great actors like Sophie Wilde and Victor Slezak are reduced to playing one-dimensional tropes rather than characters.

Harris Dickinson, whose off-kilter allure has enhanced many films like Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, and The Iron Claw, gives a frustratingly opaque performance here as Samuel, the sexy intern whose ability to quiet an out-of-control dog is this picture's inciting incident and central heavy-handed metaphor. But our inability to see him as more than an intriguing object, then a threat, then a Machiavellian trickster, and then an everyday twenty-first-century dude is appropriate since this film is told directly from the shifting and often insecure perspective of Kidman's Romy Mathis. Unfortunately, this framing of the story ultimately renders Romy also more construct than character.

Just like a film from 20 or 30 years ago would, the focus in Babygirl is much more on the threat to Romy's family life than her high-powered career. I guess I can buy Romy feeling overwhelming shame around her erotic proclivities, even though she's a sophisticated Gen-X woman living in New York City in 2024 with two teenage daughters, one of them queer. Maybe she's been married for so long and been so focused on climbing the corporate ladder that she missed out on the last twenty years of evolving conversations and cultural attitudes about sex, kink, and identity. But the bewilderment and aversion from her clueless husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) is really hard to swallow—his character is a New York theater director, for crying out loud! At one point, the young Samuel tells Jacob that his ideas about sexuality are really outdated. Ya think? That comment could just as easily be directed at this surprisingly and disappointingly regressive film.