Dutch actress-turned-director Halina Reijn’s follow-up to Bodies Bodies Bodies, Babygirl, is a provocative portrait of power struggles within a highly inappropriate relationship. The A24 release, starring Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness), is already positioned as awards bait with its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and a Christmas release date. One problem though: the film is beyond noxious.

What Is ‘Babygirl’ About?
Image via A24

Kidman plays Romy Mathis, a massively successful girlboss of a corporation that provides automation logistics for Amazon-esque warehouses. She seemingly has it all. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), is a Broadway theater director. They have two children, a luxury apartment in the city, and a house with a pool in the suburbs. There is one thing missing, though: somebody who matches her freak. See, Jacob has apparently never given Romy an orgasm. The film opens amid one of their sexual sessions, but she ducks out moments after his climax to watch porn on her laptop and self-pleasure in a separate room. On her way to work, she is struck by how a young man manages to tame an aggressive off-leash dog. He reappears in her office moments later, as one of the interns joining her company. Samuel (Dickinson) quickly makes his presence known by asking her a question and requesting her mentorship.

During their first mentorship meeting, Samuel dares to suggest to Romy that she likes to be told what to do. Normally, this would be a fireable offense in any corporate setting, but it somehow gets her knickers in a knot in a sexual way. He blocks her from exiting the meeting, so they end up making out. Dickinson’s Samuel has an air of unseriousness that can easily be perceived as joking. The actor certainly doesn’t exude an air of seduction or sleaziness. It isn’t threatening or predatory. It’s more like a mischievous but harmless child testing boundaries. Dickinson’s performance from Triangle of Sadness spills over a bit, which can only mean that he is partly channeling himself in the role. His casting is a bit of an odd choice, but not to the point of ruining things.

The running motif is that Romy fancies being treated like a dog. It’s her turn-on, and we know from the earlier scene that Samuel knows how. He sends her a glass of milk from across the bar and whispers “good girl” in her ear after she chugs it down. He orders her to get down on all fours. He commands her to eat one of those strawberry candies out of his hand. He makes her drink milk from a dish. If she’s unwilling to submit, he busts out the good old blackmail. After all, he was shown that sexual harassment training video during the onboarding.

‘Babygirl’ Is Hard to Take Seriously
Image via A24

If a woman gets off on degradation, is it sexist to comply? This is a provocative thought, if not also regressive, noxious, and unthinkable even for this male reviewer. Since the writer-director is a cishet woman, does that make it inoffensive? This is certainly a question worth asking, but perhaps not by a filmmaker who has somehow managed to exploit and humiliate Kidman more than Lars von Trier did with Dogville.

At a different time, I might have been more inclined to entertain Reijn’s proposition seriously. But it’s just her luck that the great Catherine Breillat, who has devoted her illustrious career to investigating these taboos, dropped a far superior film on the same subject matter, Last Summer, just a few months prior, beating Reijn to the finish line. Breillat imbued the forbidden May-December in that film with much more nuance, such as the successful older woman attorney’s maternal instincts and the manipulativeness of her stepson, all of which are lacking here.

In Reijn’s version, Romy’s alleged protectiveness feels like lip service to cover herself. Reijn also doesn’t consider even for a split second, that career fast-tracking may be an ulterior motive for Samuel. Instead, we are just treated to montages of sadomasochist sex with abandon accompanied by the likes of George Michael’s “Father Figure.” Where Breillat made her characters feel human, Reijn only gets to superficially ghoulish at best.

Babygirl had its World Premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.