You have to hand it to Nicole Kidman: in recent months, she (along with The Idea of You’s Anne Hathaway) has been spearheading the current renaissance of May-December relationship movies involving glamorous older women and dashing young men—and, in her case, doing double duty. First came Netflix’s A Family Affair with Zac Efron and now, Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s sultry workplace thriller co-starring the always excellent Harris Dickinson, which just debuted at the Venice Film Festival. Both films are deeply and wonderfully unserious but, beyond that, it’s probably unfair to compare them. The first is disposable fluff—the second is a mile-a-minute romp which thrills and unsettles in equal measure, and provides plenty to get your teeth into.
I would hesitate to call it a romance, though—Babygirl is about lust, pure and simple. It opens—as it ends, too—with an orgasm, delivered with complete commitment and lack of self consciousness by our leading lady, who is simply sensational here, in one of the meatiest parts she’s had in years. But, we quickly realise, she’s faking it. After her doting husband (Antonio Banderas) finishes, she rushes to the other room, opens her laptop and watches some porn involving a girl with a baby voice calling a guy “daddy”, and brings herself to climax.
In a way, it makes sense: she is Romy Mathis, the high-powered CEO of a robotics company, forever glued to her phone, chairing meetings and making crucial decisions, while also raising two young daughters and constantly reassuring her husband about his abilities as a theatre director. So, it’s understandable that she might not always feel like taking charge in the bedroom, too—she wants to be taken.
Enter: Dickinson’s Samuel, one of the new interns at Romy’s company whom she spots outside the building. When a rabid dog runs towards her on the street, everyone steps back, but he steps forward—he holds, strokes and calms her, and Romy looks on, intrigued. From the offset, he proves to be different from the rest of his cohort—a somewhat contradictory yet entirely believable and uniquely Gen Z combination of bolshiness and acute social awareness. He asks difficult questions; he keeps interrupting her; he takes it upon himself to choose her as his company mentor and arrange meetings with her.
She, in turn, begins fantasising about him. She watches him dance with girls his own age at the office Christmas party and, the morning after, finds his tie lying on the floor. She takes it to her office and stuffs it into her mouth, hungry for danger, transgression and the rush that comes with knowing that, in one swift move, you could blow up your entire life.
It all comes to a head in their one-to-one, when Samuel offers Romy his assessment of her: “I think you like being told what to do.” She’s outraged and electrified, they kiss, and neither knows exactly where they stand. A game of cat and mouse ensues: Samuel sends Romy a glass of milk at a work drinks; she downs it; and when she picks up the cheque for the whole team, he whispers, “Good girl” into her ear, the same phrase he used to soothe that agitated dog. He then invites her to a hotel room for their next “meeting”—she obliges, but when she begins a speech about how inappropriate their relationship has become, it almost sounds like foreplay; like the dialogue from the pornos she consumes so ravenously.
What follows is as hot as it is hilariously confusing: neither know exactly what to do or what they want; Romy attempts to leave but then comes back; they try things and, before you know it, she’s on all fours. After her orgasm, she clings to Samuel like a baby. It’s unclear who’s actually in charge—Romy tells Samuel that she doesn’t want to hurt him, and he insists that he has power over her. He only has to say the word, and she’d be fired.
And thus a torrid affair begins, further complicated by Samuel’s increasing interactions with Romy’s family, as well as his budding romance with another colleague, Romy’s ambitious assistant (Sophie Wilde). In one of the film’s funniest scenes, a jealous Romy warns her young protégé against the relationship, saying it could be perceived as an abuse of power. There’s also, of course, the constant, simmering threat of Samuel changing his mind, reporting Romy for real and destroying her career – a notion which seems to both excite and horrify her.
I fear Kidman’s audacious turn—slippery, insatiable, reckless and then painfully vulnerable—might prove too much for the Academy, but it’s one that demands to be seen. Yes, she crouches down on the floor to drink milk from a saucer and performs a striptease for her twenty-something subordinate, but she somehow does it all while also making Romy feel like a conflicted, flawed, flesh-and-blood woman, when it could all so easily have been parodic.
And she leaves absolutely nothing on the table—much will (and should) be written about her utterly fearless sex scenes, but there are plenty of other sequences which leave her equally exposed. In one, Romy is shown getting botox, and in another, her teenage daughter (Esther McGregor) tells her she looks like a dead fish, pushing her own lips together in an exaggerated pout to mimic her. Later, we see Romy nervously scrutinising her own reflection. There is certainly a sense of validation that she gets from being desired by Samuel, but to Reijn’s credit, her razor-sharp script resists spelling this out. Commendably, it also refrains from using a specific childhood trauma to explain away Romy’s proclivities. We learn that she was raised in a cult—and there are brief, disorientating flashbacks to that chaotic period—but that adds texture, rather than offering answers.
Dickinson is just as difficult to pin down—his domineering, self-assured Samuel is no victim, but as he gets to know Romy better, a strange and unexpected tenderness emerges, too. In one moment, he’s shown dancing in slow motion, his tattoos exposed and his innate swagger intoxicating; in another, he gently asks Romy to hold him. In one of the film’s final scenes, Banderas’s beleaguered husband laments that female masochism is a male fantasy. Samuel scoffs. “That’s a dated idea,” he counters, ever that indelible mix of youthful brazenness and new-age sensitivity. He, Kidman and Reijn deserve all the plaudits, as does Cristobal Tapia de Veer for his expertly tension-building score. (As I waited for the water bus after my screening, I heard someone humming it in front of me in the queue—always the highest compliment.)
Admittedly, Babygirl isn’t for everyone—it has divided critics and, even at the glittering premiere, as throngs cheered for the cast as the credits rolled, there were many others who slipped out, shaking their heads. Like all the other May-December films before it, it’s guaranteed to spark debate and prompt derision when it hits screens later this year—but, rest assured, it knows exactly what it’s doing. This is a thorny, unflinching declaration of raw female desire—and it is entirely shameless.
This article was originally published on British Vogue.
