Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is aware of the discourse. It’s read all the articles that have been passed around online, it knows what’s considered problematic in the year of our lord 2024, and it’s listened to all of Karina Longworth’s podcasts on the disappearance of the erotic thriller. It knows what people have been clamoring for as well as girding themselves against, which is the return of attractive people having well-lit, really good sex on screen. And if that weren’t enough, it devises a powder keg of a scenario that all but dares the viewer to be outraged in some manner or form by confronting traditional gender roles, female sexual desire as a driving force, power dynamics in the workplace, the dissolution of the nuclear family, humiliation as kink and, just to really troll people, the embrace of automation as a force for good in people’s lives. The film is like a 21st-century gender studies symposium that encourages a change of pants.
The film introduces us to Nicole Kidman’s Romy Mathis, a Type-A CEO of a company that manufactures warehouse robots, as she has sex with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Nude and filmed from an all-seeing, god’s eye view, she rides him until completion (his), and then after a bare minimum of snuggling she slips on a nightie and disappears to another room of the house where she opens up her laptop to a porn site, lies on her stomach, and begins to masturbate. Is Romy a nymphomaniac or does she merely have physical desires her husband of 19 years is incapable of fulfilling (and that she is too embarrassed to vocalize)? In her professional life, Romy is a titan of industry; outwardly impenetrable and statuesque, she keeps people around her on guard simply through her chilly demeanor. But there is a foundational weakness in her, a desire to be controlled and even be told exactly what to do (likely a vestigial element of her upbringing being raised on a commune that she compares to a cult) which a woman in her position is not allowed to acknowledge or give oxygen to. While walking to the office one morning she witnesses a strikingly handsome man in his early 20s (Harris Dickinson) bringing to heel a snarling dog running wild on a city sidewalk and it awakens something in her. Tall, boyish, and wearing an ill-fitting suit, the man both looks like a child but carries himself with an almost irrational level of self-possession.
As these things in movies often go, the young man (whose name is Samuel) actually works in her office as an intern. Walked into a pro forma “meet the CEO” session along with a dozen other interns, Samuel makes a point of raising his hand and asking whether Romy genuinely believes automation is a net positive in society, drawing a reprimand from Romy’s executive assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) and a curious glance from Romy. Who the hell is this person, fresh out of college and making subsistence wages, to interrogate the CEO on day one on the very nature of the business? Their paths continue to cross around the office, usually in some form of a micro-confrontation most people entering the business world would cut their arm off to avoid. Samuel insists that Romy honor his request for her to be his “company mentor” (she wasn’t even aware the CEO was required to participate in such a thing) holding her to account for trying to skip out on their regularly scheduled check-ins or chiding her for drinking coffee after lunch. Spotting her across the bar at the company happy hour, he has a tall glass of milk sent to her and silently urges her to gulp it down, to the astonishment of her C-level peers (as she leaves, alone, at the end of the night he whispers in her ear “good girl”). What is this dude’s deal?
The most likely answer is that he’s just an asshole and engaging in the sort of behavior that would see him bounced out of the building and blacklisted from the industry. You’ve heard about the misplaced confidence of unspectacular white men? That, except when you look like Harris Dickinson, “unspectacular” may not apply. But it’s also possible he’s instantly taken the measure of her and senses her weakness and lack of mooring and knows not only what’s required to bring her to bear, but what she secretly aches for. He invades her personal space, holding his face close to hers when they speak, dominating conversations and curtly critiquing her in ways that wouldn’t feel appropriate if they were contemporaries let alone separated by the gulf between a mountain top and dirt on a slug’s belly. He texts her at odd hours and demands that she appear at dingy hotel rooms, and the remarkable thing is, in spite of common sense and her best instincts, she does. And when he tells her to get on her knees, crawl to him and eat a piece of candy out of the palm of his hand, she of course says no… at first.
Control as both a metaphor for and prelude to sex is well-trod terrain, as is domination and masochism in mass-market crap like Fifty Shades of Grey. But typically it’s male gratification being prioritized over a woman’s desires. We’ve seen men dominate women as well as being dominated by women, but the dynamic, either through physical strength or status and wealth, typically favors the man. Whereas in Babygirl, if Samuel’s getting his rocks off in any sort of physiological sense, it’s entirely consigned to offscreen. A sexual relationship between a CEO and intern is the most textbook imbalance of power imaginable. At the same time, a CEO can be shoved out the door even by the whispers of sexual impropriety, which Samuel knows just as well as Romy does. They each hold each other’s destruction in their respective hands, and that’s the part that excites both of them (not to mention Romy has a family who would be torn apart by an affair). Reijn knows what the shape of one of these films typically is, and, more importantly, knows that the viewer knows as well. It’s taken as a given that the audience enters the film aware that Fatal Attraction, Disclosure, and Unfaithful (a not terrible film that this one is very much in conversation with) exist, and the perverse thrill of Babygirl is it walks right up to the line of being something cheap and common, only to pull up on the reins and take the material to some genuinely mature and complicated places.
The film that Babygirl is arguably most indebted to, however, is Paul Verhoven’s Elle (ironically, both Verhoeven and Reijn are Dutch), which similarly explored the problematic sexual desires of a powerful older woman who has a “complicated” relationship with consent. Elle primarily aims to provoke discomfort — for those wary of such depictions, there is no sexual violence in Reijn’s film — whereas Babygirl has lower ambitions, which is to unabashedly arouse. Reijn signals her intentions early on, setting Romy’s exacting and hugely expensive beauty regimen (botox injections and cryotherapy being on the menu) to rhythmic, almost tantric, vocalizing on the soundtrack whipping viewers into an unspoken frenzy. The film feels like it’s fucking even when everyone keeps their clothes on; for instance, in another charged moment that feels filthy without technically being explicit, Romy sneaks away alone to her office after finding Samuel’s tie left behind at the company Christmas party, draws the shades, and begins to tongue the garment. The film revels in its own impropriety, effectively arguing whether something is actually “wrong” if no laws are being broken and all parties are in agreement about what they hope to get out of it. It may position the film squarely in the realm of fantasy — for starters, the characters have siloed plainspoken sexual desire and messy emotions in a manner that’s never been achieved between consenting adults across millennia — but what a wonderful fantasy it is!
Dickinson and Kidman are performing a feature-length dance here, feeding off one another’s physical energies in a glorious give and take. The actress modulates her typical ice queen persona by willingly exposing chinks in her armor, choosing to make herself vulnerable as a means of inviting sexual actualization. The character and the film are simpatico in recognizing that something is only humiliating if it’s not willfully invited. In one of the more revealing scenes of the film, Romy attempts to get Jacob to perform a certain sexual act on her in their marriage bed and she pulls her shirt over her head, covering her entire face, before she can work up the nerve to ask for satisfaction from her spouse. By comparison, Samuel intuits her need to feel out of control and provides a safe venue where she can achieve release.
Meanwhile, the nifty trick of Dickinson’s performance is that he’s recognizably full of shit. As a domineering figure, he’s faking it till he makes it, and he’s only 80% of the way there. It’s fascinating to see the facade occasionally fall away, his stern visage occasionally giving way to a sheepish smile and a hint of uncertainty (almost as if he were thinking “is this actually stupid?”) before hardening his resolve again. The character doesn’t seem to exist outside of his encounters with Romy, and aside from brief expositional asides, we don’t get much of a sense of him as a person (at one point when the character starts dating Esme on the side it comes as much as a shock to the audience as it does to Romy). He’s a manifestation of Romy’s fantasies — not literally, we’re not talking about Fight Club here — meeting a physical need that makes her complete without bringing personal baggage into the arrangement, which is refreshing in its maturity. Maybe the lack of emotional complexity or torment is a flaw; it’s all rather convenient that nobody here has an ulterior motive, ruthless ambition, or gets their heart broken the way people who are intimate with one another do every single day. Or perhaps the film reflects an exciting shift in the paradigm where sex really can just be sex; mutually fulfilling and transient without lasting implications or emotional torment. At one point late in Babygirl, when it briefly risks becoming a much more common and formulaic thriller, there’s a confrontation between two characters, whom the film up to this point has contorted itself to prevent from falling into such an encounter, wherein share a shockingly civil exchange (after briefly trading blows). The first character says “female masochism is a male fantasy” to which the second character replies “your ideas of sexuality are dated.” Sometimes it’s nice when even the film’s characters have done the reading.
Published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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