Babygirl - Film Review

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Nicole Kidman is looking to get off in Babygirl, the knotty and tense erotic drama from director Halina Reijn. Kidman plays Romy Mathis, the CEO and founder of a robotics company. Romy is rich, powerful and admired, boasting all the trinkets of success, including a loving family. It's a fairly risky move then when she begins a heated affair with a much younger intern.



Romy heads a company called Tensile, which makes robots for warehouses (or something like that, it's very vague). More important for the narrative is Romy's status as a business leader and beacon for wannabe glass-ceiling shatterers. So we see her recording motivational speeches for her employees. We see her making important decisions. We see her in her plush corner office, the picture of a successful modern-day woman.

Things are happy at home too. Romy's husband (played quite well by Antonio Banderas) is a considerate and loving, though slightly self-absorbed theatre director (at one point he asks Romy if he is relevant to her as a director). The couple live with their two teenage daughters in a stylish Manhattan apartment, decamping occasionally to their pricey-looking country house.

But all is not well with Romy and discord becomes evident in the film's first scene. There we see Romy making love to her husband, supposedly writhing in ecstasy. But afterwards, she moves into another room in order to watch porn and climax without him.

Romy clearly needs something or someone else to satisfy her. Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who appears in a batch of new interns at Tensile. Samuel is brash, unafraid, even asking a question of Romy in the intern meet-and-greet, which is clearly not the done thing.

Samuel manages (in some fairly contrived ways) to keep running into Romy in the office. And he seems to have figured out Romy's secret: she wants to be told what to do. And Samuel, the confident young man that he is, can do that. Despite initial reluctance on Romy's behalf, the pair start a torrid affair, meeting in hotel rooms, alleyways and Romy's office.

The sex, though there is a lot, isn't overly graphic, the emphasis rather on the games played before and after, some of which do get weird (like when Romy sips milk from a saucer on the ground). But the sex isn't half as interesting as the power dynamics at play and how power is wielded, advantageously or not, by Romy and Samuel at various times.

Nicole Kidman is excellent. Her Romy is layered, complex, her confusion evident. The audience is never really sure what to make of her or where her motivations lie. It's a wonderful performance. Harris Dickinson is less solid, his Samuel comes off as vague and moody seemingly for the sake of it.

It's Kidman who holds the whole thing together and the only reason you are invested in the final outcome. Things do get silly at times, but it can be forgiven. Because Babygirl is fresh, very sure of itself and hard to look away from.

Babygirl is in cinemas January 30.

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