Babygirl (2024 | USA | 114 minutes | Halina Reijn)
A quarter century after Eyes Wide Shut, Halina Reijn puts Nicole Kidman again in a position to serve up a prickly and fun exploration of the dynamics of control, desire, and submission (also at Christmastime). Here’s she’s Romy, a do-it-all CEO/mom whose up-and-coming tech company does something related to factory automation who shares her penthouse with Antonio Banderas. He’s an accomplished theater director, but in the opening bedroom sequence, we quickly find out that Romy’s a very accomplished actress. Following a dramatic climax, she leaves her sex symbol husband wrapped in the sheets while she fires up a dingy amateur adult film to get herself off.
It’s the first of many instances where we’ll see how her life is arranged in a series rituals of suppression and control, an impulse for perpetual image curation that has become so instinctual that it has shaped her personality. She’s the face of her company, the nucleus of her household, and all of it balances on a razor sharp edge of outward-facing perfection. Of course, it can’t possibly last.
Enter a puckish self-assured Harris Dickinson (Samuel), who we meet on the sidewalk outside the tech firm’s offices exerting near mystical power over a menacing off-leash dog. His instant allure translates equally well to boss whispering. In Romy, his intern’s intuition finds a CEO who matches his freak.
Somehow “electric” has become among our most overused superlative in the current discourse, but there is no other word for the cat-and-mouse seduction that unfolds between the sexy older boss and her much-younger, magnetically handsome intern over the ensuing hours. Kidman and Dickinson are a superconducting battery — her suppressed desire, his frank indifference — and be it provocative glances across a dance floor or the tension of a one-on-one interview in a corporate office, the sparks fly instantly. Their desire is reflected in the breathy syncopation of Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s original score, immediately recognizable to fans of the White Lotus, as the sonic mirror of their push-and-pull dynamic.
There’s a ton going on in the movie, but all of it is secondary to the breathtaking dance between Kidman and Dickinson. There’s a tremendous self-reflexive montage of the full day’s arsenal of beauty regimens that Romy undergoes to be ready for a family portrait and a corporate party circuit. Meanwhile Dickinson makes the casual cool and open mindedness of consensual dominance look necessarily effortless. she lets us see all the work. the work that her character does to maintain her image — botox, sub-zero rooms, a full day’s array of beauty treatments. But whether it’s succumbing to orders in a dingy hotel room or lapping up a plate of milk in a far more upscale suite, the film revolves around Kidman even as her character is surrendring control. The emotions that she conjures with the slightest micro-expressions flickering across her face a few scenes after we watch her character get botox is among the great onscreen flexes of the year.
Reijn structures the film brilliantly: each act mirrors the previous, with elevated stakes, situational flips, and refractions of the varying levels of comfort and control. Outside of the intern-to-boss explorations of dominance and submission, the film also is a funhouse of other systems of authority, responsibility, and situational identities. Romy’s digressions echo her daughter’s dalliances with different girlfriends; her own marriage is a series of authenticity and performance; at work she’s both an aspirational figure to her female employees and a frequent roadblock to their own progress; just as her own role as chief executive is both in service to a finicky board and as a performance for the market. Without ever getting mired in the murk, i’s also frank about the degree to which my workplace romance, let alone one of doubly-inverted power dynamics (even with safe words) is both a HR nightmare and even more morally questionable (even moreso with an unsuspecting husband at home). If anything it’s quietly far smarter than it needs to be, but it’s rampant ideas never dull the movie from thrumming with so much sexual tension and interpersonal intrigue.
The metamorphic dynamics crackle across city hotels, country estates, and underground dance clubs; each reflecting shifting landscapes of comfort, compliance, and self-destructive bravado. Whether it’s a glass of milk chugged at a bar or slipping away from her family as Robyn’s generation-spanning banger, “Dancing on My Own” fills the dance floor, a sharp sense of humor also underlies the very serious business of potentially exploding a family, marriage, and career. There’s some vague attempt to explore the psychology of Romy’s submission including references to a childhood spent in cults or the pressure cooker of prestige university, but when you see Harris Dickinson and a particular George Michael needle drop that will make audiences levitate, no other explanation is truly necessary. In the end, Reijn has made this a story about getting what you want even if it’s not the way you expected it. Maybe it’s not a Christmas movie that’s for the whole family, but if you’re on its wavelength it’s a sneakily fun, surprisingly smart, undoubtably sexy, and breathlessly suspenseful and utterly satisfying way to put a bow on the end of the year.
An earlier version of this review ran when Babygirl had its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It arrives in wide theatrical release on Christmas.