‘Babygirl:’ Kidman Unveils Fearless, Commanding Performance In A24’s Erotic Thriller

Babygirl opens with an intense sex scene between married couple Romy (Nicole Kidman) and Jakob (Antonio Banderas). Once Jakob finishes, Romy rushes out of the room to watch some nasty porn and actually have her own orgasm, which led me to say out loud at my screening, “finally something provocative!”

Kidman is no stranger to making edgy choices and pushing herself as an actor from Grace, the tortured soul turned vigilante in Lars von Trier’s Dogville (still my fave Kidman performance) to the possibly deluded Anna in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth to Alice in Stanley Kubrick’s erotic swan song Eyes Wide Shut, the list goes on and on.

In Babygirl she dives right in as she often does with thrilling material and lets us inside the world of a controlled (professionally and personally), sexually unfulfilled woman too ashamed to explore pleasure and too repressed to realize she deserves it. 

Romy is her own boss, a well-respected CEO and female role model whose career comes first. She also manages the balance of having a family. 

But one day at the office a handsome and cocksure young intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), catches her eye and they embark on a steamy affair where power dynamics shift and she finally finds herself sexually fulfilled—but also guilt-ridden. 

Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) has fashioned a sexually-charged dark comedy that challenges notions of female gratification, sexual power and the desire for intimacy via a dual generation POV. 

Kidman is immersive and sublime as a lustful woman who must deal with jealousy, blackmail and judgment because of something men do all the time and no one bats an eye at. It’s a fearless and commanding performance that in a just world would attract lots of awards attention. 

Dickinson, rising like a comet since his turn in Beach Rats, is perfectly cast here as a dude who thinks he knows what women want. The actor’s tremendous charisma and brooding charm are used to good advantage. 

I enjoyed this film immensely. Unlike thrillers from the 1980s and 1990s like Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful and Basic Instinct, Babygirl does not feel the need to punish the female protagonist or turn her into some raging psycho because she might have unorthodox sexual desires. And Reijn knows exactly how to end her film turning a big middle finger at the moralizing but horrifically out-of-date Hollywood standard. 

My one complaint was that the movie never felt daring enough with some of the sex scenes. Not sure if it’s because we now live in an age of intimacy coordinators forcing a kind of carefulness or the director wanting a type of restraint. Or me being male and used to a certain kind of frankness that may not be necessary here (and also missing the authenticity in sex scenes from the films of the 1970s). 

The film wonders is it’s possible to make peace with the sexual deviant in ourselves without shame and judgment, a truly fascinating question that Babygirl smartly only hints to answer.