Babygirl (Halina Reijn, 2024)

While not perfect, Babygirl is propulsive, progressive, and subversive

Landing squarely in the middle of the Venn Diagram between Last Summer and The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something has Passed, Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is less a return to classic tales of female masochism than a demonstration of changing attitudes towards female sexuality. Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a woman who seemingly has it all. She lives in a beautiful mansion, is a mother of two, and also has time to be the high-powered CEO of a robotics automation company. Unbeknownst to her husband Jacob (played by Antonio Banderas as a kind-hearted silver fox), Romy has a masochistic fetish, and her inability to feel pleasure during his preferred vanilla sex has started to wear on her commitment to the relationship. So, when Samuel, a mysteriously beautiful, charmingly impudent intern (Harris Dickinson) joins the company and asks to be mentored by Romy, Reijn sets the stage for a sexy, terminally online romp.

Of course, that’s not exactly what happens. Reijn threads a tricky needle, charging Romy and Samuel’s interactions with palpable eroticism while withholding actual sex scenes. In fact, I’m not sure if Samuel ever goes further than taking off his shirt. The relationship is pure fantasy, a necessary escape for Romy, who feels increasingly powerless in her marriage and work. Kidman gives a icy, brittle performance, but it’s Dickinson I was most impressed with, whose sassy indifference gives life to a character that’s essentially a glorified plot device. It’s Dickinson who gets to deliver the film’s most revealing line, when he calls out generational differences between himself and Jacob, telling the tortured husband that the trope of the female masochist is just a male fantasy. In the modern day, we can understand that a kink can just be a kink and that with proper communication, these desires won’t portend abjection. With that in mind, there’s actually something subversive about the film’s decidedly un-scandalous rendering of Romy and Samuel’s relationship, and the film’s sleek, televisual style, clearly playing on shows like Succession and Industry, stands in for a contemporary perspective.

Less successful is the handling of Romy’s work, where she is manipulated and abused as a figurehead for “women in tech”. To put it simply, Romy’s subservient position in her company is presented as a nonconsensual relationship. These aspects are handled rather clumsily, filled with lazy symbols and cuts. Reijn also makes the unfortunate choice to psychologize Romy’s fetish as childhood trauma (there are literally multiple scenes of her undergoing EMDR therapy), creating explanations that threaten to flatten the entire film, but really capsize the film’s commentary on Romy’s relationship to the company. It’s telling that these ideas are left glaringly unresolved in the film’s ending, which re-centers Babygirl as a great film about a modern woman taking control of her own sexuality.

Babygirl is distributed by A24 and playing in theaters now.