Review: Babygirl

Image courtesy of A24.

Halina Reijn's offbeat and kinky "Babygirl" features a solid leading performance from its leading lady, Nicole Kidman, as well as plenty of intriguing moments and an interesting storyline about a woman in power who comes to find that she doesn't need to seek permission from anyone.

That being said, the catalyst at the center of the earth-shattering upheaval in Romy's life - an intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) - is a bit of an enigma to the extent that we never really learn what his motivations are or what he gets out of the bargain, other than the obvious.

As the film opens, Romy is a CEO and founder of a company that manufactures robotics for warehouse delivery systems, thereby removing the need for humans. She projects confidence and has a young assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), who wants to follow in her footsteps as a powerful woman at the head of a company.

At home, Romy is seemingly unfilled with her sex life, namely due to the fact that her seemingly nice-guy husband (Antonio Banderas) isn't interested in such bedroom behavior as placing a pillow over her head while having sex. After a tryst early in the film, she sneaks off to the bathroom to watch porn on a laptop. Ironically, her husband is a theater director overseeing a production of a Hedda Gabbler play about a woman who is unhappy in her marriage.

Things take a turn for the strange when Romy spots Samuel, the intern, and is immediately taken by him. His behavior toward her is, by all workplace standards, alarmingly inappropriate. Upon her first meeting with a pool of interns, he asks probing questions and, as time goes on, he continually engages in behavior that is probably frowned upon in a workplace.

Eventually, an unspoken game begins between them, starting when he orders her a glass of milk from across the room when workers from the company are at a bar. She defiantly drinks it down, and on the way out the door at the end of the night, he whispers "good girl" to her. In a later scene at a hotel room, she crawls on the floor and laps up milk from a plate upon command.

On the one hand, "Babygirl" is - much like another 2024 movie, "The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed" - a film about a woman involved in a relationship built around domination, but it's also about the balance of power. Romy believes that she, as a person in a position of power, would be seen as a villain for having a sexual relationship with an intern, who seemingly holds no power. Then again, as Samuel tells her, he holds power over her if he threatened to reveal their relationship to anyone at the company.

Further complications ensue - Romy and Samuel's relationship continues to threaten her increasingly dysfunctional home life, while it also comes out that Esme is having a relationship with Samuel, albeit one that does not involve domination. 

The element that makes "Babygirl" mostly work is Kidman's solid lead performance. Its biggest issue is that Dickinson's character is enigmatic almost to a fault. He exists solely for Romy to use as a method of liberation if that, indeed, is what she is seeking or achieving. Otherwise, Samuel is a cypher with seemingly no motives or purpose.

Reijn's previous film was the horror movie "Bodies, Bodies, Bodies," which had a great punchline of an ending but was an otherwise rote slasher movie with some arthouse pretensions. "Babygirl" is a step up, undoubtedly, and Kidman's performance is among her best in recent years. Even if the film doesn't work entirely, it's unusual and provocative enough to remain interesting throughout.