​Reijn Introduces ‘Babygirl’

By Greg Carlson

gregcarlson1@gmail.com

Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn’s previous feature, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” was a dizzy, snarky riff on the Old Dark House motif and one of 2022’s most slept-on cinematic treats. Now, with a major Oscar-winning star in Nicole Kidman and a high-visibility Christmas Day release, the director — who also wrote the screenplay and produced — is poised to raise her profile with “Babygirl.” A throwback to the era of psychologically-motivated erotic thrillers that were occasionally taken seriously at the 1980s and 1990s box office, Reijn’s movie is a fully engaging fantasy investigating the desires of a high-powered CEO who embarks on an ill-advised infidelity with a young intern (Harris Dickinson, perfectly cast).

Reijn’s exposition includes the crackerjack revelation that Kidman’s Romy Mathis has never been brought to orgasm by her devoted and seemingly skillful husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas, also perfectly cast). One might think that a top-of-his-game theatre director — he’s working on a stylistically “edgy” production of “Hedda Gabler,” naturally — might be able to sniff out the real versus the pretend after nearly two decades with his partner, but as soon as Romy can fake her climax, she scampers down the hall with her laptop to privately masturbate to some domination/submission porn. Whether Jacob wonders where she went matters less than his inability to play along whenever Romy hints that she would like something other than vanilla.

In the meet-cute featured in the heavily marketed trailer, Romy is “rescued” from an aggressive dog by Dickinson’s resourceful Samuel, who calms the canine with a cookie from his pocket. Reijn makes enough room for us to wonder whether Samuel planned every last detail of this initial encounter, and that second-guessing and uncertainty will bloom into a motif as the story takes its inevitable course. Soon enough, the boyishly insouciant Jacob starts pushing Romy’s buttons, immediately stepping over the boundary so clearly marked by any corporate sexual harassment training. But unlike Barry Levinson’s “Disclosure” and Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play,” Reijn is not interested in directly addressing the broader political dimensions at the intersection of sex and the workplace.

Instead, the filmmaker aligns the viewer with Romy as she struggles with her interior conundrum: the seemingly irreconcilable divide between the protagonist as an effective boss and leader who also derives sexual gratification from being told what to do. As a (still) rare woman in the male-dominated realm of robotics applied to warehouse automation, Romy wonders more than once if there is something inherently “wrong” with her or if what she desires is “bad.” Fortunately, Reijn mostly pulls back from the standard equation that kink deviates from the norm as the result of trauma or is otherwise something that can be “repaired” (i.e. “Fifty Shades of Grey”).

Part of the fun in watching “Babygirl” is experienced by engaging with Kidman’s total commitment to the role and Reijn’s smart decision to not take anything too seriously. In addition to the director’s devilish sense of humor and appreciation of camp, she sidesteps a list of genre cliches while subverting others. Supporting characters are handled with a refreshing sense of respect (including the minor subplot that probes Romy’s evolving relationship with her teenage daughter). Others have already pointed out ways in which the movie thematically overlaps with predecessors like “Belle de Jour” and “Secretary.” I would add Joanna Arnow’s recent “The Feeling When the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” to that list as a key companion piece.