‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Debased and Desired by Harris Dickinson in a Kinky, Sex-Positive S&M Dramedy

1 day ago 6

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Venice Film Festival. A24 releases “Babygirl” in theaters December 25.

The worst thing your partner could possibly say to you after sex, after you’ve said “I love you,” is the dreaded “love you.” No “I.” And that’s not the most demoralizing response Romy (Nicole Kidman) has for an amorous confession by her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) in “Babygirl,” writer/director Halina Reijn’s provocative erotic dramedy that begins and ends with an orgasm. One of them is faked, but in between, this perversely funny and absorbing new film explores the pleasure gap between men and women, and how our inability to talk about sex limits our ability to just do it.

Nicholas Hoult at the "Renfield" premiere

And there’s lots of sex here, with Kidman going raw inside and out for one of her top performances in a career built on risk-taking. That’s all the way back to her psychosexual breakout in “Dead Calm” and as recently as “Big Little Lies,” where she played a woman in a more blatantly toxic kind of S&M relationship than the sex-positive one her powerful CEO shares in “Babygirl” with a seductive intern, played by Harris Dickinson.

The top executive of a New York robotics company who bills herself as a “strategy expert and human expert,” Romy lives in a Manhattan high-rise with her doting playwright husband Jacob and daughters Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly). In the opening scene, she can’t get off even while on top of her husband (in a sexual position that establishes from the gate who’s the dom in this relationship), and so after sex, she tiptoes off, naked from the waist down, to the next room and squirms and writhes on the floor while making herself come to submission porn. Back at the glass-enclosed Tensile offices the morning after, she’s got everything under control, including her junior associate Esme (Sophie Wilde), eager for a promotion.

But into her life saunters Samuel — played with a sly inscrutability by the sexy rising actor Harris Dickinson — to blow it all to pieces. In a near-injurious encounter echoed later in the film and in kinkier terms, Samuel saves Romy from almost being attacked by a dog. (How, you ask? He keeps biscuits in his pockets. Twisted, right?) Yet it turns out that Samuel, in an ill-fitting suit that shrinks the actor into looking even younger than he is, is one in an upstart crop of interns sent to Tensile to gain field experience. Quickly, he sets off on an aggressive pursuit of the twice-his-age Romy (Dickinson is 28 and Kidman 57) wrought in danger — or, as we learn, in the thrill that comes from just getting close to danger’s edge.

At an office Christmas party, Samuel catches Romy smoking on a low-parapeted balcony, a meet-cute that marries a nasty, secret habit with the potential for oblivion just below the railing. Later, in a different context, Romy tells Jacob about waiting for “the avalanche that will cover us all very soon.” She’s talking about the end times — you know, the one that artificially intelligent robots could both save us from and damn us to — but she might as well be predicting what’s to, well, come.

That Jacob is mounting a production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” about a woman trapped in a dead-end marriage and in a home she doesn’t want, is unsubtle but effective stage-setting for the utter implosion Romy’s about to experience. But rather than structure Romy’s descent into lusty madness as a force of utter Freudian annihilation (as with Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher,” clearly a reference here, as is Steven Shainberg’s 2003 law office kinkfest “Secretary”), Kidman and Reijn make Romy’s transformation a joyously destructive one instead.

When Samuel “accidentally” leaves his tie on the dance floor at said Christmas party, Romy later takes it back to her office and all but shoves it down her throat. That’s about the least depraved flourish of fetishism in a movie that at one point involves milk play straight out of “9 1/2 Weeks,” but done more playfully than Adrian Lyne’s grim ’80s sadomasochistic romance. That Reijn, an actress herself, previously starred in erotic cinema master Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 “Black Book” is a significant filmmaker calling card, too.

Samuel entreats Romy to a seedy Lower East Side hotel room, where their game of sexual domination and subjugation begins in giddily deviant earnest. In a movie that often cuts fast and frequently between takes, Reijn and cinematographer Jasper Wolf get down on the floor alongside Kidman and hold on her face as Samuel pleasures Romy from behind; she emits a guttural orgasm more like the one she brought out on her apartment floor alone than with Jacob in bed.

“You like to be told what to do,” Samuel later tells Romy when she tries to break off an affair whose wheels came off before the train even left the station. Reijn appreciates a female orgasm — more elusive and soul-shattering than the champagne-cork pop of a man’s, as this movie argues — for its volcanic power, like a boiling pot of water that eventually overflows. And in Romy’s case, it could take her down. You’ll recognize the breathy choral swirls of “White Lotus” composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, whose score seems on the verge of orgasm itself.

For all Romy’s self-inflicted processes of control — like in a montage of Romy undergoing cryotherapy, light therapy, botox, and a plunge pool that inadvertently or not plays with Kidman’s own physicality as an actress who probably does all of the same — Samuel unzips her like a dress. Leaving only the inside-and-out naked woman standing before him, begging to be debased. Kidman is rendered nude in several scenes that never feel exploitative or too revealing, while Dickinson, who was very much naked in his breakout “Beach Rats,” is only ever shirtless.

With “Babygirl” cast entirely from the female gaze from director to script and star, it’s a curious decision, especially in a moment where male nudity is more everywhere onscreen than ever before. Like some of the film’s headier gender theory concerns, especially in a blunt conversation toward the film’s melodramatic conclusion where characters too much speak their subtext about sexuality, the choice to keep Dickinson mostly clothed isn’t unpacked. Nor is his character, a brooding void without a backstory. But this is about Romy’s erotic journey, not Samuel’s.

Either way, Kidman and Dickinson’s chemistry fashioned during an intimate rehearsal period with Reijn is dynamite. What “Babygirl” is not is a movie where Romy’s relationship with Samuel is considered abusive, as much as her position of power makes their affair inherently illicit. But Reijn is no moralist; refreshingly, there are no lessons learned here other than that men and women should probably try talking to each other more about their furtive desires in life and in bed. No one gets punished for what they’re doing here, though Esme soon cleverly introduces some strategy of her own that jeopardizes her superior’s romance and career. “Bodies Bodies Bodies” writer/director Reijn doesn’t make a mountain out of the fact that Esme is a Black subordinate at the mercy of a white boss, but you’re invited to consider those racial corporate politics, often as tricky as a May-December erotic entanglement in a boardroom.

In what might be an American movie first, Kidman is here the female version of those lored-about male CEOs who hire younger female escorts to tie them up and leave them locked in a penthouse for a long weekend, parsing morsels of food from a dog bowl. Romy infantilizes herself under Samuel’s sexual grasp, with Kidman’s petite frame and Romy’s pleadingly hungry carnal need at times turning her into a little girl hoping to be loved. And fucked. “Look at me! I’m not normal,” she tells Jacob in a moment of throwdown candor. But Reijn doesn’t care what “normal” looks like, and Romy’s tumble into an erotic stupor is never made out to be a perversion. It’s more that Romy is finally getting a grip on what she really wants out of life and sex.

If only “Babygirl” didn’t overstate its intentions with a three-handed dialogue about retro sexual misunderstandings in the last third. “Babygirl” is otherwise a smart and absorbing kinky entertainment until then. Still, Kidman sells it, as she does everything here, making Romy into one of the great psychosexual screen heroines — a shot straight to the pants in a movie moment where sexuality has been deprioritized for the sake of slogging, obligatory trauma narratives that seek to explain it.

There’s a hint at Romy’s dark past — perversely undeveloped but portentous enough, involving a cultlike upbringing — but the past is not pathologized to explain how she got here now. How refreshing this is, a movie about sexual behavior in the moment, celebrated for its existentially illuminating potential and not as a neurosis needing to be solved. Without Kidman in a fearless turn and Dickinson there to pivot her to the edge, “Babygirl” wouldn’t work as smashingly as it does. This is a sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work. Don’t sleep on it.