Babygirl (18)

Powerful CEO Romy has a picture-perfect life with her husband Jacob and family. She is used to being in charge in her professional life. Romy risks career suicide by embarking on a passionate affair with her younger intern, Samuel. He is the dominant personality in their private relationship and pushes Romy to the edge of her sexual limits.

LondonNet Film Review

Babygirl (18) Film Review from LondonNet

Writer-director Halina Reijn’s unflinching study of female sexuality is bookended by orgasms, captured in exquisite, unabashed close-up on the face of Nicole Kidman. The first is loudly faked for a partner, who subsequently punctuates his sweat-glistened pleasure with three whispered words (“I love you”), and the second is intense, raw and genuine, reflecting a rare intimacy and vulnerability that requires no verbal outburst…

Nothing is faked by Kidman in Babygirl. She delivers a fearless, gut-wrenching portrayal of a businesswoman, wife and mother ashamed of the animalistic desires in her head until an abuse of power with a male subordinate allows BDSM-charged fantasy to become intoxicating and potentially career-ending reality. Reijn’s provocative picture explores the different masks we wear in front of others – partners, family, friends, work colleagues – and the self-hatred that festers behind these masks when we refuse to acknowledge our primal impulses.

Cinematographer Jasper Wolf shoots predominantly on handheld cameras to capture the electricity of Kidman’s scenes with co-star Harris Dickinson. Some of their most pulse-quickening moments are single, unbroken takes. Dramatic tension relentlessly cranks up as consensual partners flaunt safeguards and the possibility of their discovery becomes a shattering inevitability.

Romy Mathis (Kidman) is CEO of New York-based logistics company Tensile Automation, which has just launched a new robot named Harvest to speed up the selection of warehouse products. She is one of the few female faces in the boardroom and an inspiration to her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde). The sheen of power and self-confidence that radiates from Romy in the office dulls at home where her two daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly), plant seeds of doubt about her parenting skills and she struggles to maintain a vibrant sex life with her theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Art subtly imitates life because Jacob is poised to open his multimedia Broadway staging of Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century drama about a stagnant marriage.

Cocksure 20-something intern Samuel (Dickinson) brazenly propositions Romy during a private mentoring session and she subsequently kisses him. The pair meet in a cheap hotel and Romy nervously vocalises her unfulfilled desire to be a submissive in the bedroom. “I tell you what to do and you do it,” asserts Samuel and she complies. Risk is part of the thrill until Romy’s carefully ordered, picture-perfect world implodes and she faces the devastating consequences of her actions.

Babygirl is a kinky power play that brings Kidman full circle from 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, in which her doctor’s wife confesses to forbidden passions while smoking marijuana with Tom Cruise’s ego-bruised husband. Banderas simmers until a cacophonous third act, which affords him a scene-stealing explosion of rage and despair. Reijn’s script provides no miracle ointment to salve these freshly inflicted wounds. Pain is handcuffed to the pleasure.

– Jo Planter