BABYGIRL

Neither a slyly titillating experience nor a pulsating erotic thriller, Babygirl rehashes stale sexual taboos under the guise of a female empowerment message that’s muddily inarticulate.

Whether as a guest on Dutch talk shows, as an actress infamous for baring it all, or in her directing debut, which probed a therapist’s irrational, sexually charged crush on a violent inmate, Dutch multi-hyphenate Halina Reijn has never been shy to tackle sexuality in all its forms. She does so again in her third film, Babygirl, but here her supposedly groundbreaking provocations prove to be tame, predictable and often boring.

Lead actress Nicole Kidman plays the CEO of a huge tech company who’s sexually unsatisfied in her otherwise happy marriage to a famous theatre director. When an intern gets hold of her desire to be dominated and controlled – much like a dog needs to be domesticated – they start an affair that threatens to unravel her entire life.

You’ll notice that the narrative fits snugly in a recent string of films by female directors that put female characters into control of their own desires. Babygirl thus is very much on-brand for the post MeToo world and has been marketed as such. Yet look beyond the thematic gloss and you’ll find a shallow tale that’s neither original nor fully realised.

Watching the film I was continually reminded of a much better film from over two decades ago that handled a similar subject with much more poise and sexual tension: Stephen Shainberg’s Secretary. The questions that film posed are never apparent in Babygirl, which seems to just want to shock without following up with timely observations about today’s sexual and societal mores.

The shallowness is further enhanced by a bland Nicole Kidman performance, direction that lacks coherence and a soundtrack that is so blatantly obvious in its music choices – George Michael’s Father Figure to name just one track – that it becomes laughable, if not quite as bad as the picture’s final ten minutes, that tie up loose ends with script contrivances that any screenplay coach would slap an F grade on.

release: 2024

director: Halina Reijn

starring: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde