Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s debut as a feature film writer/director, simultaneously reasserts Reijn’s talents as a director and highlights her faults as a screenwriter. While the movie starts off well enough, as it must with its premise of “high-powered CEO begins a dom/sub relationship with her intern,” it soon begins to flounder before climaxing like a million other melodramas about affairs. 

Towards the middle of the film there’s an almost back to back repetition of a montage of CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) and intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) giddily and discreetly fucking (without much d/s play) before Samuel unexpectedly arrives at her home causing problems. It’s a quickly repeated sequence of events that makes the whole movie feel like a premise in search of a narrative to carry it to feature length. 

The repetition also confuses what is going on between the characters, creating questions about what allows the exact same series of events to play out twice. To add to the confusion, it’s only after the first round of good times and a surprise visit that the two have a conversation about setting ground rules. Other films have used the messiness of when to have the rules conversation to thrilling and titillating effect, but in Babygirl it simply seems as if it got misplaced and should have arrived earlier. 

By the final third, we’re in well trodden territory that has nothing to do with the specifics of our leads’ d/s dynamic and everything to do with the millenia old tradition of adultery stories. Acknowledging this by having Romy’s theater director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas in an inspired casting choice) working on a production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler doesn’t make it any less rote, and in fact simply points out that there can still be interesting art made about this all too human situation. 

Reijn broadens the theme of control and willingly giving it away by writing the corporation as a leader in warehouse automation, at one point Romy says something about wanting to give people their time back. But instead of meaningfully tying this to Romy’s sexuality or using it to comment on capitalism turning automation into a danger rather than a boon to the working class, the film uses its setting to attempt to say something about corporate feminism. I think?

Scenes between Romy and her assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) overwhelmingly revolve around Esme’s having fully bought into the social importance of women as business leaders, nevermind what the businesses actually do. It’s unclear where the film lands on this as the scenes are neither legibly critical of nor espousing this position, making it register as nothing more than a box that’s been ticked because this is a movie about a woman CEO. 

In the midst of all this narrative and thematic flailing, Babygirl does deliver some aesthetic pleasures. While there simply aren’t enough d/s scenes throughout the film, and the few that there are often leave something to be desired, the moments leading up to Romy and Samuel’s initial physical connection are palpably erotic in their suspense. Reijn communicates longing and caged desire with shots through the glass walls separating corporate offices and conference rooms, alternately placing us with Romy and Samuel as they look through these invisible barriers at one another. Tight framing makes the anticipation of their first kiss almost as frustrating for viewers as it is for Romy when Samuel tauntingly pulls back, forcing a blur of the image as the handheld camera zooms out ever so slightly to keep them both in frame. 

Just as sometimes happens with real sex though, once the anticipation has paid off things grow increasingly less interesting and by the end Babygirl is unsatisfying on every level.