I didn’t expect to like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl as much as I did, but it did end up getting its hold on me by the end. Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman as Romy Mathis, a tech company CEO, is professionally successful and well-liked and has a great assistant and mentee, Esme (Sophie Wilde). She has two daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly), and a loving theater director husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), but Romy isn’t happy at all with her life. She longs for something, and it’s pleasure. Never satisfied sexually with her husband, her life is thrown upside down once she meets a new young intern, Samuel, with whom she begins a kink-tinged adulterous affair.
This setup isn’t a new one but also a completely different lens as it’s flipped with it being an institutionally power woman involved with a younger, less powerful man, and then this film flips that as well. The nature of their relationship and her submission to him and role play teases and pulls at your thoughts of dynamics along with the wants and desires of people. Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson, plays this guy as not an innocent young and naïve person -which again makes a film that feels like something new and different, not that different from what we’ve seen before but more so how Reijin handles it. For me, Samuel is a guy who enjoys this dynamic of having this woman on the precipice of losing everything because of this relationship while also being in complete control.
His constant infractions on her personal life while giving her what she desires were handled just blankly enough from him as you focus more on the emotional rollercoaster Kidman’s Romy goes through. She’s really out here lacking but you empathize with her so much throughout the whole thing. To the point for me it had me shaking my head at Banderas’ Jacob for being so constantly unaware and obtuse to everything going on with his wife internally. I was left a bit wanting more of Sophie Wilde and her dynamic with Romy. She knows more than we, the audience, and Romy think she does, but she seems very cynical about how she moves in this world. I might just desire more stories about Black women in tech while also wanting more Black women in tech, but the morsels we get feel like there’s more there for Esme that we never get.
The film is sexy but doesn’t focus on titillation. But does well by its main characters to understand them and show their humanity. It doesn’t make Romy a bad guy in her marriage or become a lazy version of gender-flipped Fatal Attraction. I think this is a better film for people to watch than have people reading hundreds of words about it all. Babygirl is a surprising film for this season of the year, but it is one that I welcomed seeing; it is a mature film about desire, marriage, and sex handled by a good filmmaker and has good performances.
Score: B+
