‘Babygirl’: Nicole Kidman’s Latest Is a Sexy Shot of Cinematic Viagra

Big-screen eroticism has been in short supply for much of the past two decades, and Babygirl, in theaters Dec. 25, is here to rectify that situation.

An uninhibited examination of lust, need, trust, consent, and self-discovery, Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn’s feature is a simultaneously steamy and cheeky story about a corporate bigwig who jeopardizes her career and her family by engaging in an unconventional tryst with a younger colleague. Boasting an exceptional Nicole Kidman performance as a woman recklessly in search of who she is and what she wants—as well as the orgasm that she’s long coveted—it’s a thrilling and amusing shot of cinematic Viagra.

The CEO of a robotics company, Romy (Kidman) runs her day-to-day with the same rigorous efficiency that defines her machines. She’s happily married to theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), with whom she has daughters Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly), yet there’s something missing—namely, a suitable climax, which the attentive and frisky Jacob can’t give her, forcing her to sneak off, post-coitus, to a separate room so she can finish herself off to online porn, her hand over her mouth to muffle her moans.

At the top of the mountain but, in this respect, unfulfilled, Romy is at once poised and unstable, and her life is further disrupted when she heads to work and runs into a stranger destined to rock her world.

That would be Samuel (Harris Dickinson), whom Romy encounters on the sidewalk outside her New York City office building, calming a vicious female dog that was racing toward her. Thus, with a straight face that makes it all the droller, Babygirl introduces Samuel as a man who can tame a b---h, and he’s soon revealed to be one of the many interns joining Romy’s firm. Moreover, he requests the CEO as his mentor, and though Romy bristles at this turn of events (she doesn’t even want to be a part of the program), she relents and meets with him.

From their first interactions, Samuel is cocky to the point of brusqueness, and if his overly forward conduct is borderline unbelievable, it also makes him an embodiment of Romy’s deeply buried carnal fantasies, no matter that she responds by stating that “your behavior is totally out of line.”

Writer/director Reijn balances the sexy, the suspenseful, and the comical to shrewd effect, all while taking Romy’s subsequent course of action seriously. A titan of industry who’s clearly drawn to Samuel’s domineering attitude, Romy is, on the surface, a person in a position of unimpeachable authority who finds herself attracted to being submissive to this twentysomething suitor. Babygirl, however, twists that somewhat cliched characterization (and scenario) in all sorts of interesting ways.

Romy and Samuel’s ensuing affair is a messy tangle of sexual and professional power dynamics, elevated by Kidman and Dickinson’s scorching chemistry, and the film refuses, at every turn, to simplify its protagonists’ feelings about themselves and each other. Initially peaking with a meeting at a rundown motel where Romy gives in to Samuel only after repeatedly objecting to his commands, their union is cast as a joint exploration in which neither is completely sure of what they’re looking for, thereby giving the material an unpredictable live-wire electricity.

In lesser hands, Romy might have been a familiar, hoary archetype: the controlling boss who secretly yearns to be controlled. Kidman and Reijn, though, imagine her in more complex terms, suggesting that the seeds of her compulsion lie in her upbringing in a cult (an echo of the director’s own childhood), and depicting her heedlessness as a byproduct of various desires—to be young (hence her Botox injections and cryo chamber sessions), to be impulsive and wild, to be satisfied, and to understand the unexplored parts of herself.

Figuratively and often literally naked, Kidman’s turn is precise in its evocation of Romy’s passionate confusion, and it’s all the more engaging for being unafraid to show the ugly and absurd sides of the character’s quest, which she knows threatens to detonate everything she holds dear.

Babygirl is too nimble to sermonize and too complicated to be reduced to a simple equation; from the fact that Jacob is a committed and considerate lover (rather than a dead fish to be rejected), to Dickinson’s impressive portrayal of Samuel as both a dictatorial dom and an immature kid who views their clandestine relationship as akin to children playing, the film never wags its finger or sands its prickly edges.

Reijn and cinematographer Jasper Wolf’s handheld camerawork reflects Romy’s anxiety and the volatility of her self-made circumstances, and Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score is similarly restless, marked by a recurring song comprised of thumping beats and breathy moans.

There’s a playful quality to the proceedings that prevents them from ever getting preachy, epitomized by a sequence set to George Michael’s “Father Figure” that recognizes that sex is often unbearably hot and inherently funny. That’s also true of a scene in which Samuel states, in on-the-nose fashion, that their fling is “about giving and taking power,” and Romy responds by asking if he went to the library to look up that description.

Whether she’s downing a glass of milk that Samuel sends to her table during an after-hours drink with coworkers, or agreeing to follow his every order in and out of the office, Romy subjugates herself to perilous degrees, especially once she learns that Samuel is dating her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde), whose wish for a promotion eventually becomes another component of this dangerous game.

Reijn’s script surprises by avoiding the easiest route available, positing Romy and her compatriots as kindred souls intent on taking big risks in order to achieve their aims in both public and private arenas. Culminating with brazen acts and intense confrontations, it neither judgmentally damns these individuals nor completely lets them off the hook, and it consistently comprehends Romy in unruly three dimensions, allowing her foolishness and fierceness to be two halves of the same whole.

Babygirl is a story about the pursuit of female agency (however Romy defines it), and the director interjects it with just the right amount of humor and heat. Investigating the illuminating things sex says about us, Reijn’s film is the rare mainstream effort willing to raise the temperature to mature and exciting ends—not to mention a testament to its leading lady’s still formidable star power.