By Jake Wilson
BABYGIRL ★★★★
(MA15+) 114 minutes
There are numerous good reasons to see Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, but here’s the best one of all: I doubt Nicole Kidman has ever been weirder. As Romy Mathis, the CEO of a robotics company based in Manhattan, everything about her is wilfully off-key: Romy in theory is a polished corporate type, but her “gracious” professional manner is so visibly calculated she seems constantly on the verge of falling apart.
Nicole Kidman plays robotics company CEO Romy Mathis in Babygirl.Credit: Niko Tavernise
Kidman uses a version of the breathy little-girl voice we’ve heard from her before (Reijn’s idea of what being a CEO entails seems to involve a lot of rote learning to deliver the expected trite speeches about empowerment and so on).
But under pressure Romy can slip into other voices, as if an especially well-organised demon were speaking through her – and then there are the amazing noises that come out of her during the sex scenes, the moans and whimpers of an arousal difficult to separate from panic.
Romy has a lot to lose. Left sexually unsatisfied by her nice but dull husband (Antonio Banderas, impressively self-effacing) she embarks on an affair with the enigmatically good-looking, much younger Samuel (Harris Dickinson, whose performance is as original as Kidman’s, despite its strategically much more limited emotional range).
Samuel is an intern at Romy’s company, making their relationship doubly transgressive – though as he points out, he’s arguably the one with the real power in the situation, since by disclosing the truth he could end her career.
Not all viewers will be equally ready to invest in the fantasy of Babygirl.Credit: A24
The relationship isn’t sado-masochistic in a Fifty Shades of Grey sense, but it’s one of dominance and submission, with Romy in the unfamiliar submissive role (she spends some time crawling round on all fours).
It becomes evident that despite their chemistry neither of them has a clue about how the dynamic is supposed to work – leading to a lot of uneasy comedy as they apply their engineering brains to figuring it out.
All up, this is a much more ambitious, boldly dissonant movie than I anticipated from Reijn, a Dutch director whose previous US film, the teen horror-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, was amusing but weightless (unlike Babygirl, it wasn’t from her own script).
It’s true that the shape of the story is more conventional than many of the individual scenes, and that the stylistic flourishes can feel arbitrary: I’m not sure what’s gained from the direct visual allusions to Kidman’s career-defining role in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, including the many glowing Christmas trees.
Antonio Banderas plays Nicole Kidman’s nice but dull husband. Credit: Niko Tavernise
Perhaps it’s a way of saying that, as in Kubrick’s film, it’s necessary for viewers to set their expectations aside. Babygirl has been billed as an erotic thriller: the erotic part is accurate, but it’s hardly a thriller, although several characters act as if they imagine they’re in a thriller for the space of a scene or two.
Threats are made and ultimatums delivered, but little that anybody says sticks, to the point where this becomes an implicit running joke: even when it seems crystal clear Romy and Samuel have to stop seeing each other, he shows up a couple of scenes later as if nothing had occurred.
The movie also isn’t entirely a satire. Still, there are satirical implications built into its vision of sex and business as parallel realms where a range of transactions can take place and where power relations aren’t simply imaginary, but only become fully real to the degree people choose to invest in them.
Not all viewers will be equally ready to invest in the fantasy of Babygirl, but the awkward space between safe distance and all-out commitment is where the movie invites us to spend some time.
Babygirl is in cinemas from today.
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