‘Babygirl’: More Farce than Erotic Thriller

Babygirl (2024) tells the story of a woman with a dark secret: she wants to be dominated sexually. If that fantasy seems a bit vanilla in 2024, or at the very least anodyne, it is – particularly as it unfolds in this film. Billed as an erotic thriller, Babygirl features Nicole Kidman as Romy, a high-powered New York CEO, married with two kids, who seems to have the proverbial perfect life. The film begins and ends with her orgasmic moans: the first fake, the latter real. We eventually learn that she’s been faking it for 19 years, a bombshell fact for any relationship that’s dropped into the script with very little impact. As with her masochistic proclivities, the ‘dark disgusting thoughts’ she’s had since childhood, which are given no explanation beyond the notion she was ‘born like this’, the lack of psychological profiling in Babygirl undermines its capacity to rise above the barely titillating register in which it feels stuck. That it’s a younger man, and an intern at that, who undoes what is stuck in her – a need for release through humiliation – giving her an orgasm so powerful it makes her cry, only adds to this sense of anodyne titillation.

Romy first spots Samuel (played by Harris Dickinson) out on the street, subduing an aggressive dog that’s off its leash, and when he shows up in the office as a new intern insisting on her being his mentor, their torrid affair begins. ‘How did you get that dog to calm down like that’, she asks him. ‘I gave it a cookie’, he tells her. And soon she becomes his willing dog, lapping up milk in a saucer on a hotel carpet and eating a candy treat she dutifully spits out upon his command. That scene, allegedly drawn from the film director Halina Reijn’s personal experience, was met with gales of laughter by the theatre audience I sat among. It doesn’t help that Romy is rendered prudishly shy by her deflowering here, despite her brazen willingness to risk her career and family for it. Or that to the more nuanced eye, assuming a desire to be dominated means a desire to be humiliated, and not teasing out the differences between the two, betrays a novice perspective.

By this point in the film, Samuel has begun to manipulate even her consent, threatening to reveal the affair to her superiors if she doesn’t continue, and menacingly showing up uninvited to her home. He continues to demean her with insults and also becomes romantically involved with one of her colleagues, whom he manipulates as well. His motivation is also unknown. ‘Sometimes I scare myself’, he admits at one point, but for what, and why? ‘I’m not scared of you’, Romy unconvincingly replies. 

Kidman and Dickinson give very compelling performances, but the infantilizing of Romy by Samuel, evoked in the film’s title, not only confuses and skews any sense of her agency, it makes it hard to take her seriously. Instead of exploring the intricacies of submission, consent and trust that circumscribe actual BDSM relationships, we are immersed in a poorly executed plot of intrigue that tries to upend power and gender dynamics in the workplace in a reversal of roles that feels about as feminist as Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), if better acted. Samuel, more a Machiavellian grifter than a Dom or a sadist, not only has the upper hand, but seems to wield his control over everyone despite his lowly status. When the affair is finally revealed, the husband (played by Antonio Banderas) asserts that female masochism exists only as a male fantasy, to which Samuel, not Romy, responds that such a view is dated. What’s dated is this message. And that’s the problem with the entire film.

If Romy finds new footing in the end as a defiant submissive, Babygirl still treads old ground, inevitably drawing comparisons to the 2002 film Secretary, which explored similar dynamics through conventional work roles, yet was, for its time, far more transgressive. And more importantly, interesting. In an age of memes and internet porn, making a Hollywood film like Babygirl today requires acknowledging the changing appetites of its audience for whom BDSM has become mainstream. Otherwise, you run the risk of people laughing at the wrong bits.

_{Main image: Nicole Kidman and Harry Dickinson in Babygirl, 2024, film still. Courtesy: A24}