For a film that begins and concludes with an orgasm, Babygirl’s most sublime sequence is Harris Dickinson dancing shirtless to George Michael’s Father Figure playing in the background with a fragile, bathrobe-clad Nicole Kidman scooped in his arms after the having spent hours in a seedy hotel room making life-shattering love.
This is the first time since Andrew Scott’s magnificent “kneel” moment in Phoebe Waller Bridge’s culture-defining Fleabag that a scene is so laden with movie magic that it could burst into flames. Writer-director Halina Rejin’s Babygirl is worth watching for this sequence alone. Everything else— Harris Dickinson’s inscrutable magnetism, Nicole Kidman’s frantic, feverish performance, Cristobal Tapia deVeer’s pulsating background score, the film’s unmistakable female gaze, and its unabashed exploration of sexual desire outside of what’s considered normal—is bonus.
Nicole Kidman plays Romy Mathis, a high-strung CEO of a warehouse automation giant, who seemingly has it all—a gilded office with a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline, a theater-director husband who dotes on her, two daughters, and a mansion in the countryside. But despite her best efforts to hold it all together, not everything is as neat as she lets everyone around her believe. Married for 19 years, she has not had an orgasm with her husband even once and he has not the slightest idea about it.
Enter Samuel, one of the interns in the new batch of recruits at Romy’s company. Though he’s half her age and at the base of the corporate ladder that she reigns over, there’s an unafraid enigma about him that startles Romy and awakens her most primal, NSFW instincts that she’d worked hard all her life to bury. The staging of their meet-cute is telling.
It’s a morning like any other. After perfunctory, performative sex with her husband, she dashes for work but stops in her tracks in front of her office building as she sees an untamed dog dangerously attack a passerby. Just as it comes charging toward her, a stranger on the road quiets it in an instant. Frozen, Romy is shaken by the absolute command he has over the canine.
He turns out to be Samuel, an intern where she is the CEO. Thus begins their rendezvous, a seductive, perverse play of power and desire, as they get to know themselves and their wants better through each other.
The dog metaphor—where he’s in command and she obeys—runs throughout Babygirl. There are several scenes in which Samuel gets Romy on all fours. In one, he feeds her a candy off his palm. In another, he gets her to lick milk kept in a saucer on the floor. Even the last scene is wonderfully crafted. Romy and her husband are in bed, she’s looking straight into the camera, holding its gaze. It’s intercut with shots of Samuel playing with the dog in the same seedy hotel room in which they once were with Cristobal Tapia deVeer’s breathless background score reaching a crescendo.
Though it hints at Romy’s dark past, Babygirl never tries to burden her present with it. It’s not interested in excavating Samuel’s backstory either. In planting the two of them firmly in the moment, it savors their equation for what it is—transient. Even though Romy is convinced that something about her is not normal, the film does not judge her or Samuel for seeking pleasure or not being afraid to go wherever this search might take them.
Since Babygirl does not see its protagonist as a sinner, it’s not interested in punishing her either. In fact, through Halina Rejin’s eyes, Romy is a woman on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery. It’s this shift in perspective that changes everything. Despite Romy putting all that she has at stake, the film doesn’t make her pay too dearly for seeking fulfillment that starts with the body but does not end there.
It’s the second film after last year’s A Family Affair in which a Nicole Kidman character starts a torrential relationship with a man young enough to cause scandal. Though Romy and Samuel also indulge in the games of dominance and submission, it’s not psychologically or physically abusive as the relationship Kidman’s character had with her husband in HBO’s blockbuster series Big Little Lies.
He falls in the same universe of sexy, mysterious, assured movie men but Samuel is no Christian Grey. Albeit unusually attuned to what other people might want, just like Romy, he too is fumbling, testing, questioning, playing, susurrating at the seams. It’s a delight to watch the two of them stir up a storm in a world overdosing on propriety.
