Babygirl is unabashedly, giddily sexy – with a tremendous Nicole Kidman

In the cinema of kink – Secretary (2002), The Duke of Burgundy (2014), or, at its nadir, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) – there’s often a pattern of the learned and unlearned, the assured and unassured, and not always in a way that correlates directly to the dynamic of dominant and submissive. It’s often sexuality as the experience of the naif, taken by the hand and led into a private world, the halls of pleasure already constructed and defined by another.

Babygirl is different. Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn, also behind 2022’s amusingly nihilistic slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, has made a BDSM film rife with fumbling uncertainty. Yet it’s no less sexy, unabashedly and giddily so, thanks in great part to its committed leads, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Tech CEO Romy (Kidman) is deeply in love with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), but sexually unfulfilled. She’ll fake her orgasm, sneak off into a dark room, and masturbate to BDSM porn. She knows what she wants, but won’t accept it. She’s a submissive in denial. But Samuel (Dickinson), the new intern she embarks on an affair with, isn’t exactly a connoisseur in the art, either. He’s got a strong opening play – he sends her a glass of milk at the bar, covertly watches her down it in one gulp, and then whispers “good girl” on the way out – but starts to falter in the bedroom. “Maybe take your clothes off?” he suggests. They’ve both eagerly consented to the arrangement, but the question is: what happens next?

Reijn is interested in the conflict between the subconscious and the conscious, and cinematographer Jasper Wolf’s camera reflects that prickly sensation with a sort of slick casualness – as if we’re overhearing everything from the corner of an executive party. Romy wants her sex life to reflect her “girlboss” persona, in which she’s always on top, even in the bedroom (in fact, that’s exactly where we first find her). But she’s practically been made speechless by her own shame, which means the first moment of revelation arrives as a wave of existential terror. Facedown on the floor, on the verge of tears, she whispers, “I can’t, I’m gonna pee, I don’t want to pee”, seconds before she climaxes in a series of grunts so animalistic you could only trust an actor as fearless as Kidman to deliver them.

Kidman’s always possessed an inexhaustible ability to surprise us, fuelled by a hunger for the whole breadth of cinema and human experience. She’ll get us comfortable with a certain image of her stardom, excessively be-wigged and glamorous, careening across the melodrama space, before turning up in the same visual uniform for this, Park Chan Wook’s Stoker (2013), or Lee Daniels’s The Paperboy (2012), and unleashing all kinds of psychosexual hysteria. She’s playing a tremendous game with her audience, and winning every time.

Dickinson, then, is an ideal onscreen partner in that pursuit. Samuel isn’t easy for us to pin down. When he’s dancing, shirtless, to George Michael’s “Father Figure”, one eye is on the spectacle of his body, the other left to frantically decipher meaning from his odd litter of tattoos. But the actor quietly fills that space with a person who still feels rich and whole, if elusive. Tender here, defensive there.

Questions of power and exploitation bubble constantly beneath the action, complicated in fascinating ways by the presence of Romy’s assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde), who wants to see her boss, or at least wants people to perceive she does, as a feminist hero. Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.

Dir: Halina Reijn. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas. Cert 18, 115 mins.

‘Babygirl’ is in cinemas from 10 January