“Babygirl” Review: Nicole Kidman Is at Her Brave Best in a Wild Tale of Sexual Adventure

Nicole Kidman, as you probably know, is a dauntingly hardworking actress of great versatility.

She’s done impressive TV work, notably on HBO’s Big Little Lies and Prime Video’s Expats. She won an Oscar as Virginia Woolf in 2002’s The Hours and then went on to give clever, credible performances as everyone from Lucille Ball (Being the Ricardos) to Princess Grace (Grace of Monaco).

With her small, brittle voice, she doesn’t have the sweeping theatrical heft of her fellow Australian Cate Blanchett (Apple TV+'s Disclaimer). What she possesses, though, are a physical delicacy and a sharp, ironic intelligence. These serve her well, especially in bold, adventurous roles that seem to free up a deeper, somewhat unnerving dramatic instinct — films that you could call “Nicole Unbound” vehicles.

These include the mesmerizingly odd Dogville, in which she plays a gangster’s daughter victimized by the citizens of a small, mean town (her stunning revenge is cruel and pitiless), as well as Birth, a romantic drama in which she plays a widow trying to figure out whether a 10-year-old boy is her reincarnated husband. Oh. Not what you'd call 'Oscar bait.'

Audiences haven’t paid much attention to these films despite Kidman’s brilliance in them. Babygirl, which also happens to fall under the same Nicole Unbound rubric, may do better, given that it’s erotic and sensational and features Kidman at her best.

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She plays Romy Mathis, a married Manhattan executive who embarks on a reckless affair with her intern Samuel (The Iron Claw’s Harris Dickinson). Samuel’s attractiveness seems to have more to do with a presumption of masculine authority than youthful sex appeal. (Dickinson, come to think of it, suggests Ryan Reynolds in a permanent, brooding sulk.) Anyway, the relationship veers into sadomasochism, with Samuel as the dominant player. He commands Romy to drink, catlike, from a bowl of milk, and she obeys.

Kidman goes all out in these scenes: She seems to have found a modern equivalent to Belle de Jour, the dreamily perverse 1967 classic in which Catherine Deneuve, as a French wife with hair the color of properly chilled champagne, fulfills her repressed erotic fantasies.

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Romy, of course, is risking a hailstorm — think really large stones, or smallish boulders — that could destroy her career and alienate her colleagues and her husband (Antonio Banderas). This storm arrives, in due course, and Romy is pummeled.

However, don’t sit there waiting for the conventional social retribution against a so-called fallen woman. Babygirl isn’t Madame Bovary, which ends in suicide, let alone the Blanchett movie Notes From a Scandal (2006), a valuable lesson in how not to trust an unmarried older coworker (Judi Dench) with details about your extramarital debaucheries. Romy isn’t particularly chastened at the end. She’s taken her lumps, but she doesn’t seem to have forgotten the liberating S&M thrill of her fling.

If anything, she’s gained a greater wisdom about the power games played by both the opposite and the same sexes. So don’t call her “Babygirl.”

Babygirl is in theaters Dec. 25.

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