Christmas is a psychologically perilous time for Nicole Kidman’s characters. Twenty-five years after the release of Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT, she plays another wealthy and professionally successful New York wife fantasising outside of her marriage – but in Halina Reijn’s BABYGIRL, Romy Mathis (Kidman) is the one who goes on the secret adventure rather than her spouse.
Romy has everything – two children, loving stage director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), and immense power as a tech CEO. But after the film’s opening sex scene between Romy and Jacob, she sneaks away to watch porn once he is asleep. Not all is picture-perfect, and she finds herself drawn to new intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). He projects cool confidence and an insouciant disregard for hierarchy; a mentor-mentee relationship soon becomes an affair where the roles are reversed.
BABYGIRL is Reijn’s sophomore feature, and the actor-turned-director draws powerhouse performances from her cast. Kidman anchors Romy’s self-discovery with a mixture of reluctance, heady abandon, and grief for the life she barely dares imagine. Dickinson, a young actor moving from strength to strength, captures the bravado of early adulthood. Banderas is a kindly presence. Other cast standouts are Sophie Wilde as Romy’s ambitious yet empathetic assistant Esme and Esther McGregor as eldest Mathis daughter Isabelle, figuring out her life and loves as a high schooler.
“While embracing the animalistic, unglamorous, and often very silly nature of sex and desire, BABYGIRL is far from transgressive, perhaps catering too much towards securing a wide release in the United States, but the film’s very vanilla idea of BDSM suits the milieu.”
While embracing the animalistic, unglamorous, and often very silly nature of sex and desire, BABYGIRL is far from transgressive, perhaps catering too much towards securing a wide release in the United States, but the film’s very vanilla idea of BDSM suits the milieu. Considering Romy’s straight-laced world of power pastels, professional Christmas photos, and late nights at the office (not to mention Samuel’s youth and the self-deprecation in his own experimentation), jumping straight into the extremes of human sexuality would stretch credibility. The film may not broaden horizons, but it prioritises the emotional and entertainment value of its scenarios.
While BABYGIRL is full of rounded, complicated humans, the script stays clear of over-explanation. There is an almost throwaway line of Romy’s about being raised in a cult, but it plays as the straight-laced CEO’s attempt at a joke to explain her over-achievement rather than a canon truth. Likewise, Jacob’s production of Ibsen’s HEDDA GABLER, complete with sparse set and video projections, feels like a nod to Reijn’s own early career as a definitive Hedda in Ivo van Hove’s 2004 stage production as well as an oblique thematic mirror to Romy’s own forbidden desires. In one early scene, Jacob passionately expounds on the play’s themes (to him, it’s about suicide, not desire) as Romy types away on her phone; as their story unfolds, however, the enchantment of taboo in a world ill-equipped for the healthy expression thereof shows life and longing as intertwined.
“The film may not broaden horizons, but it prioritises the emotional and entertainment value of its scenarios.”
In the end, BABYGIRL is not interested in morals or destruction. While the emotional toll Romy’s and Samuel’s affair takes on them and those in their immediate circles is unflinchingly and truthfully drawn (Kidman’s magnificent performance elevates and drives home this spiritual weight), not all must be lost, ruined, or dead by the time the curtain falls or credits roll – unlike in previous stories of wayward, wanting women.
BABYGIRL is festive family fun in the least traditional sense. Finding levity and grace in human weakness and the messiness of navigating human desire and dynamics, the film gives generational acting talents a phenomenal showcase that will ignite conversation, not offer the final word.