Babygirl Fails to Fully Embrace the Erotic Thriller Genre

There's a scene in Sex and the City where Charlotte is complaining to a group of married friends about her newlywed frustrations. "My husband can't get it up," she gripes, declaring him a lightweight in the bedroom who doesn't realize she wants to be "pounded hard."

"Damn it, I just really wanna be fucked, you know?"

This is the shallow revelation that motivates Babygirl, the new erotic thriller from Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn, that feminism and consent culture cannot fix the fact that certain women find sexual submission, well, kinky. Middle-aged, facelifted Romy (Nicole Kidman) is one of these women. A high-powered executive at a robotics company in Manhattan by day, at night, she fakes orgasms with her inoffensive theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas, smartly cast against type) and then sneaks off to watch porn so she can finish herself off. At work and home, she floats through company PR videos, office parties, and family portrait sessions wearing a kind of impassive mask, a corporate tatemae, behind which there's not much of anything beyond unbearable horniness.

The mask finally comes off when Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a handsome, overeager intern, starts to orbit her. He concocts an excuse to get them alone together. "I think you want to be told what to do," he says to her. She acts shocked, yet she can't deny him. At a bar, he orders a glass of milk for her, which she drinks coldly. He sneaks up and whispers in her ear, "Good girl." The games continue until they finally consummate their affair in a cheap hotel room.

And that's when the film stops being cool and starts being corny. Far from the joyously raunchy erotic thrillers of the 1990s, Babygirl's treatment of sex is utterly unsexy. Kidman and Dickinson fumble through their trysts like nervous high schoolers. Reijn sets their encounters to soulful '80s pop songs like INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart," pulling together montages of ridiculous antics like Romy licking milk from a bowl on the floor and Samuel dancing shirtless — not nude, just shirtless — to George Michael's "Father Figure."
In context, it makes sense for both characters. Despite his ruggedly masculine exterior, Samuel has clearly never dommed anyone before, much less his boss, and Romy's bloodless corporate personality can only take so much stimulation. But none of it is lurid, exciting, or even remotely sexy. The whole affair has the awkward tone of Jeff Bezos' sext messages to mistress turned partner, Lauren Sanchez ("I love you, alive girl") in physical form, earnest but utterly unseductive. It's not for lack of trying from Kidman — when she does come, she really comes, issuing guttural, roaring moans with every orgasm that make her performances at home sound like kitty-cat mews. Yet outside the bedroom, Romy feels devoid of personality, a smooth, NARPY elite as lively as one of the robots her company manufactures. Especially in an awards season that features Daniel Craig passionately fucking a younger man in Queer, it all comes across as a bit too tame.

The real problem is that Reijn can't really embody the sense of danger that the older erotic thrillers had. I think of David Cronenberg's '90s output, films like Crash and Dead Ringers, where the characters put their literal bodies on the line for the sake of gratification. Or Verhoeven's neo-noir Basic Instinct, where Michael Douglas' detective shacks up with Sharon Stone's femme fatale, knowing full well she may be plotting his murder. And, of course, there's Kubrick's elite sex-cult thriller Eyes Wide Shut, featuring an iconic performance from Kidman herself.

Ironically, at one point, Romy even vocalizes this idea, complaining that there has to be something at stake for her to feel satisfied, some kind of risk to her perfect little life. Yet the worst that could happen to her is the affair is exposed, she loses her job, and her unhappy marriage falls apart. Maybe the scandal causes her to lose face within her social circle. So what? None of this makes her any more sympathetic. Compared to things that have actually befallen real CEOs recently, reputational damage feels a bit paltry.
This is why Dickinson's character and performance interested me far more than Kidman's. Samuel approaches the situation with the managerial attitude of a generation that came of age during the #MeToo movement, aware of consent and power imbalances. She submits to him in the bedroom, but outside of that, he's scared of her, and his second thoughts about the relationship set off a power struggle between the two in which he plays defense. Romy tells him to stay away from her family after he drops in nonchalantly at their upstate vacation home — she forgot something at the office. Later, when she visits the bar he moonlights at, he gets a coworker to politely kick her out. He knows she could ruin his life with a snap of her fingers, and he bets he can do the same to her with an email to HR.

Still, I don't feel this gamesmanship makes the film any cleverer. Ultimately, Babygirl delivers nothing more than a facile, pop-psychology gender flip of the same tired dynamic we've seen in hundreds of films: The boss having an affair with the secretary. Kidman's performance may be visceral in places, but it doesn't make her character any less pathetic or weaselly for trying to quash a situation where she ultimately has all the power. Maybe that's the true message of the film. It's not that feminism under capitalism has generated a world in which women can be empowered to act out their true desires; it's that it's taught women that they can be just as venal and self-serving as men when given the C-suite.

Babygirl. Starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, and Antonio Banderas. Written and directed by Halina Reijn. 114 minutes. Rated R. Opens Wednesday, December 25; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/showtimes.