Touching in our optimism, we often call age 50 midlife, but who are we kidding? While it’s true that a not inconsiderable number of people make it to age 100, most of us are likely to poop out before then. But that doesn’t mean we should slouch dejectedly through our final two, three, or four decades. No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Nicole Kidman plays Romy, an alarmingly successful businesswoman. She runs a massive Amazon-type company, each day going to work in a different softly draped pussy-bow blouse and plush luxury-fiber coat—if colors had executive overlords, she’d be the CEO of Taupe and Sand Pink. Romy ping-pongs between a glassy-chic Manhattan apartment and a pleasant, sprawling house that’s just a short, enviable drive from the city. She has a great relationship with her two daughters, the wise, grounded teenager Isabel (Esther McGregor) and the slightly younger Nora (Vaughan Reilly), who loves girly things like costumes and dancing—neither gives her much trouble. And her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a lauded and unaccountably hot stage director, adores her, both in the bedroom and outside it.
But we know in the movie’s first few minutes that something is wrong in this impossibly charmed life. In the couple’s marital bed, Jacob goes through all the motions of pleasing his wife—except she’s just not feeling it. She fakes her way through, grabs her laptop, and, leaving her snoozing husband behind, rushes into the next room, where, with the help of a porn video, she finishes the job herself.
This is clearly business as usual for Romy, and for her it’s fine, just fine, in the way we all accept things we either can’t or don’t want to change. But the next day, Romy heads to work; one of her tasks for the day will be to greet the company’s new batch of interns. She hasn’t even entered the building when she stops short, seeing a German Shepherd off his leash and going crazy on the street. A lanky young guy in a shabby parka almost miraculously calms the dog, as if reading its tiny mind. Later, this same guy will have a similar effect on Romy, bringing her down from her tense perch even as he sets her nerve endings ablaze.
This is Samuel, played with purring carnality by Harris Dickinson. Romy doesn’t know it when she sees him on the street, but he’s one of her new interns, and he’ll turn out to be an agent of erotic chaos. Samuel’s motives are never clear. (A small credit-sequence coda raises more questions than it answers.) But that’s probably the point: Babygirl is all about Romy’s stifled desires, her inability to take responsibility for her own pleasure. It’s also, partly, about the desire not to hurt those we love. Romy knows she’s made a vow to her husband, whom she genuinely loves, and Samuel the space invader—that is, a man who has invaded both her head space and the vibrating force field around her—is causing nothing but problems.
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But then, what is life except solving problems—especially those deeply private ones we can’t talk about with friends or family? Babygirl is structured like an erotic thriller, and it works on those terms, crackling with a frisson of danger. But Reijn, who has built a career as an accomplished actor (she’s superb in Paul Verhoeven’s 2006 Black Book), has given us a movie that stretches in many directions at once: it’s so pleasurable to watch that you might not realize until afterward how deeply it’s reached you. This is only Reijn’s third feature as director—following Instinct (2019) and Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)—but it’s so subtly and skillfully made that it just skims by. And it’s a superb showcase for actors. Reijn is alive to them and all they have to offer; you can tell there’s a web of trust woven between her and them. That’s what makes the movie feel both luxurious and illicit. You never fear the worst is going to happen; it’s the kind of movie you lap up like a saucer of cream.
Speaking of cream, Reijn has a buoyant, sly sense of humor, and her actors are all in on the game. At work, Samuel gazes at Romy both appraisingly and possessively. He’s already got her in his power; she just doesn’t know it. When she goes out for after-work drinks, Samuel is there too, in another part of the bar, laughing it up with his fellow interns. Mysteriously, a glass of milk appears at her table, just as Samuel glances her way. At first, she’s outraged; she’s been disrespected. Then her composure shifts into flirtatious, kitty-cat compliance. She downs the milk in one go and looks up defiantly, thinking she’s won the dare. Later, as she settling the bill, Samuel passes by her and murmurs, “Good girl.”
And this is barely the beginning. Reijn finds ways to touch on dozens of intricacies about power in the workplace and in the bedroom, about the ways women business leaders are expected to live up to standards men have never been subjected to, about the anxiety women feel about aging and the lengths to which they’ll go to limit its effects. Samuel draws Romy deeper and deeper into a clandestine affair, but it’s her guilt over the pleasure he gives her that really messes up her head. Her young assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), is angling for a promotion, and deserves one. But she’s gotten a whiff of Romy’s illicit behavior, and she’s not above using her disapproval as a kind of moralistic feminist bullying; she accuses her boss of failing to “set an example” for the young women coming up behind her. Reijn doesn’t take this conversation in the direction you think it’s going to go. It’s one of the film’s sharpest moments.
She, Kidman, and Dickinson are partners in crime here, together treading into dangerous, if not forbidden, territory. In his relatively short career, Dickinson has already given a number of superb performances. He’s great as a confused teenager in Brooklyn’s outer reaches in Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats, and as a reluctant male model in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. (He’s the only reason to bother with Östland’s smirky, self-satisfied picture.) He’s terrific here, alternately opaque and magnetic. One minute he’s drawing Romy to him; the next, he’s ever so gently pushing her away, and he does the same with the audience. In real life, he’d be bad news. But as a dangerous movie heartthrob, he offers nothing but bliss.
Yet the movie really belongs to Kidman. This is one of the finest performances she’s ever given, in a long career. She has apparently reached the DGAF era, and it offers nothing but promise for her. It’s hard to know exactly how she does what she does in Babygirl. Her face is a pristine porcelain surface, unmarked by time. This is usually the exact opposite of what we want in our actors. We love unfettered expressiveness, unlimited mobility, the ability to laugh or weep, grimace or grin, with abandon. But Kidman seems to draw everything from deep within her—there are big feelings there, yet she lets them out only in small flickers of light and warmth. The effect is both remarkably subtle and intensely moving. In her first assignation with Samuel—he’s told her to meet him at a not-very-nice hotel, the kind of joint she’d never frequent by choice—he persuades her, in buttery tones, to get down on all fours. We can’t see what he does next, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is Romy’s pleasure, and her shame. “I can’t,” she says. “I’m gonna pee—I don’t want to pee.” And then she makes a guttural noise, like a horse in its stall. Here we have one of the most exquisite-looking performers of the modern era, speaking to the animal nature in all of us.
Kidman is, simply, pure pleasure to watch here. In the movie’s most glorious sequence, Romy and Samuel meet in a much nicer hotel—she shows up in an evening dress, which doesn’t stay on for long, but this isn’t a let’s-rip-our-clothes-off kind of movie. Instead, garments are peeled off, as if they were the last things standing between our outside-world selves and our inner selves—we need to shed these skins slowly as we shift between these two stages of being. The music is George Michael’s “Father Figure.” It’s one of those naughty-innocent songs, flirting with taboos even as it embraces us in a swirl of reassurance that everything’s going to be all right. Samuel doesn’t smile or laugh much in Babygirl, but here, he and Romy gambol and play like bear cubs. His shirt tossed aside, whiskey glass in hand, he laughs unself-consciously as he works his best male-stripper moves. Romy leans back in a chair and drinks him in. Who’s zoomin’ who? For this moment, they belong to each other, but also to us, and their abandon sets something free in us too. Maybe midlife is an elastic term; maybe it simply means being in the middle of life, rather than clinging timidly to the sidelines. Babygirl makes you believe it.
