Babygirl Review

She’s a woman who has it all. The high-tech business, the immaculate apartment, the loving husband and family, and all the positive publicity she could want. She’s an aspirational figure for women in her organization and business as a whole. But in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl Romy (Nicole Kidman) wishes for more – something deeply carnal and way riskier than any business deal she’s ever signed.

Her glossy, near-perfect life is blown apart when a dog hurtles towards her on the way to work. She’s scared but saved by a young man who distracts the dog with a cookie. He fascinates her – and she’s thrown even more off-kilter when he arrives in her office as one of a new batch of interns. His arrogance is magnetic and he seems to turn up everywhere, apparently pursuing her, so it’s no surprise when things take a turn for the physical. Except this is all about her humiliation and his dominance. The stakes become higher when he starts dating her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde): what they know could bring her world crashing to the ground. But it’s also a huge turn-on.

He does, incidentally, have a name but we don’t learn it for some time, yet another indicator of the distance Samuel (Harris Dickinson) places between him and his prey. This is no relationship in the literal sense of the word: there’s no real connection between the two, more each of them getting what they want from the other, with him making sure he’s the dominant partner. For her, it’s all about the search for that elusive orgasm, which is absent in her relationship with her faithful husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Sex is plentiful and it comes with love, but it’s never truly satisfying for her. With Jacob, it’s emotionally empty but physically gratifying and comes with an irresistibly large helping of risk. Like the morality tale says, “Be careful what you wish for.”

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But Reijn’s interest in the main concept wanders, with the result that the film is overstuffed with other ideas. There’s the older woman/younger man dynamic, the sexual encounters and how they’re portrayed, and, thrown into the middle of everything, a really clumsy metaphor about Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Yes, you read that correctly. Banderas is a theatre director and his latest triumph is a production of Hedda Gabler. Their younger daughter is called Nora and, at one point, offers to dance the tarantella, a reference to the climax of A Doll’s House, another Ibsen play about an unhappy, unsatisfied woman trapped in a marriage to a conventional man. It’s superfluous and you can almost hear the clunks as it moves along.

It’s down to Kidman to hold the whole thing together and she’s more than up to the task in a bold, full-on performance, one with just the right touch of panic lingering beneath the surface. And Dickenson’s on-screen coolness makes him a great choice for her tormentor. Babygirl is about sex, for sure, but is it sexy? Not really. The affair is torrid but toxic, with an emotional void at its centre. The film follows the same path, imposing a distance between both the people on the screen and their audience and, with its overwrought narrative, it’s hard to ever feel truly involved.

★★★

In UK cinemas from 10 January / Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Vaughan Riley, Esther McGregor / Dir: Halina Reijn / Entertainment Film Distributors / 18