Venice 2024 review: ‘Babygirl’ – Nicole Kidman shines in BDSM drama

Already the most talked about film in this year’s Competition, Nicole Kidman stars as a woman willing to risk it all for a torrid affair that allows her deepest desires to finally surface.

Romy (Nicole Kidman) has got it all. She is a successful and admired CEO with a doting husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).
That said, the fact that she heads up a company specialized in robotics and that her husband is a theatre director should tell you that she knows a thing or two about living life in automation mode and excels when it comes to nailing a performance when she needs to. As we learn in the first scenes of Babygirl, she is sexually going through the motions and needs to head to her laptop for some sub-dom roleplay once she’s had a seemingly intense orgasm with her husband.
She begins an affair with the cocksure Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of her new interns who she previously clocked in the street taming a dog who was about to launch itself at her. She’s immediately drawn to his assertiveness, his disregard for office niceties and his general disobedient attitude. As their BDSM-tinged relationship develops, so do the threat levels.
Is Romy finally getting to explore the sexual terrains she has previously denied herself, putting her on the way to sexual fulfilment? Or is she being used by a rather predatory man who could torpedo her everything she has built at the drop of hat?  
As Samuel casually points out: “I could make one call and you could lose everything.”
But that could be the biggest turn on of all… And she seems to realize it. When Jacob asks her early on if he is relevant to her as a director, she replies: “We are all irrelevant – we need to pay more attention to the avalanche that’s going to cover us very soon.”
Prescient words, as an avalanche is coming.
To label Babygirl a transgressive erotic drama might be doing it something of a disservice; while it is steamy at times, it’s more of a late-stage coming-of-age tale that deals with self-discovery and focuses on a woman’s vulnerability, shame, rage, and how she deals with slanted power dynamics.
Dutch director Halina Reijn, who previously directed Bodies Bodies Bodies, as well as Instinct, which centred on a psychosexual relationship between a sex offender and his therapist, shows once again that she can delve into illicit desires and gendered power dynamics with brio. Here, she shines not only in the way she explores how “shameful” desires need their space – and how their suppression can be just as potentially dangerous as a torrid affair – but also in her lack of moral judgement. Reijn’s film embraces the often-contradictory forces that make people who they are, and never judges its characters.
There are no good or bad binaries here; just complex people with voracious desires which adds to the central question: Who is in control?
Kidman excels when it comes to embodying this, and is mesmerizing throughout. She imbues Romy with an understated vulnerability and conveys her inner conflicts despite attempting to keep up appearances. As for Banderas, he delivers an understated performance that completely matches hers with significantly less screen time.
What prevents Babygirl from being a true knockout, however, are superior cinematic touchstones, as it’s hard (pipe down at the back) not to think of The Piano Teacher, Elle or Eyes Wide Shut. All feel relevant since (in order): Isabelle Huppert is this year’s jury president and starred in Michael Haneke’s erotic psychological drama; she also starred in the 2016 psycho-sexual thriller by Paul Verhoeven, a director who Reijn acted for in Black Book in 2006; and Kidman was on the Lido 25 years ago with the late director’s final – and controversial – film. Granted, all directed by men but feature complex female characters and explore layered feminine desire in ways that make behind-the-camera genders irrelevant.
Reijn’s take on the 80s erotic thriller remains a bold update, and never limits itself to post #MeToo moralising. It’s a brave film considering its candour and casting, as the film does hit at the heart of American puritanism and puts certain films that consider themselves to be envelope-pushing in perspective, highlighting once more that some of its supposedly taboo-shaking predecessors (9 ½ Weeks, Fifty Shades of Grey) are in fact tame in the extreme – and in the latter’s case, deeply insulting. However, the aforementioned films from Haneke, Verhoeven and Kubrick felt more challenging when exploring complicated and prudishly impermissible yearnings.
While Babygirl is an admirably sex-positive drama, it does tend to limit itself to: Honest and open communication regarding desire is vital. Crucial though that message is, the film may not be the electrifying, nor thought-provoking, jolt one could have hoped for.
Babygirl premiered at the 81st Venice Film Festival in Competition.