✯✯✯✯½

There’s nothing that makes people tick quite like seeing sexuality on screen. In writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, it’s this very thought that results in an incredibly frank portrait of where human desires are born. The very conceit alone seems like one that’s designed to provoke, but in doing so it also explores where people find a sense of liberation – for it’s also a natural course of action after the submission. But this kinky mind game only shows that there’s much more going on underneath, especially when we’re seeing how people in positions of power utilize it for themselves.

Nicole Kidman stars as Romy, a high-strung tech CEO who is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theater director with whom she has two daughters. As the film starts, the two of them are engaging in intercourse but she also feels that her own sexual life is unfulfilling, and even watches pornography with the intention of stimulating herself once again. At work, Romy shows herself to be very ruthless and always puts her work ahead of everyone else, but it’s also where she meets the younger intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). Eventually, the two of them begin a passionate affair that could easily jeopardize everything she’s worked her life for, but might also be the key to the reinvigorating her own life at home.

Although Babygirl has been classified by some as an erotic thriller, it never particularly feels as if it quite enters that territory. Halina Reijn presents a case against the norm in which sexuality is being utilized in order to assert that they’re within positions of power in their own lives. Reijn doesn’t see them as bad people, but they’re people who are engaging in such because they can. It’s what makes them human beings after all, even if it all in practice might seem disgusting, but these thoughts are not alien to human instinct in the slightest. Knowing this, Halina Reijn opts for a more playful take – and it’s all the more entertaining as a result.

It’s playful in the sense that this film knows the morale of its viewers, often embracing puritanism, but doesn’t care in the slightest about that whatsoever. The deeper we dive into the nature of this BDSM-driven romantic affair, we’re left in that position where we have no choice but to submit. It’s the only choice that Halina Reijn is leaving us within, for she’s playing a game involving the sexual politics of a puritanical culture and testing us all the more for it. But all the joys of this very kinky ride come from the fact that she’s exploring two vastly different generations and how they come to understand one another through their own ordeals.

But most of all, it’s a portrait of self-discovery through these kinky games. Nicole Kidman brings out a career-best performance in that role of Romy, a woman who sees herself above the rest of her peers, but is submissive within her own sexual relationships. Halina Reijn doesn’t seek to paint pictures of people in simple terms of good or bad. That’s also part of what makes Babygirl so fun, because they exist beyond such simple definitions. Harris Dickinson is a perfect counterpart in that sense, because he presents himself as an easy charmer, but he brings a very down-to-earth quality to the role of Samuel that only allows us to see eye-to-eye with his own mind games.

Yet as a response to these conservative and highly puritan ideals about what’s deemed acceptable or not within the mainstream, Babygirl isn’t just provocative. It knows that such people exist and want to be desired in order to move forward in their own lives, they end up taking part in these taboo relationships as a means of fueling themselves up close. This is not a story about people who are in love, nor is it a romance, but it’s a movie that’s actively discouraging simple morality reads because that’s not where Halina Reijn is coming in from. Instead, she’s coming from a place of interrogating how limiting that play actually is – and thus it leaves Babygirl as a must-see.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via A24.

Directed by Halina Reijn
Screenplay by Halina Reijn
Produced by David Hinojosa, Halina Reijn, Julia Oh
Starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas
Premiere Date: August 30, 2024 (Venice)
Running Time: 114 minutes