Review: 'Babygirl' Sizzles with Problematic Kink

From its opening moments, writer-director Halina Reijn's "Babygirl" sets out to titillate and provoke. We're barely into the movie when Romy (Nicole Kidman), the CEO of a company that provides robotics to Amazon-type fulfillment centers, has a close call with a vicious dog on a city street. A young man saves the day by whistling to the dog, bringing her to heel, and feeding her a treat.

"Good girl," he whispers.

It's hard not to miss the glaring symbolism here, especially when Romy's rescuer turns out to be none other than a handsome young intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who is starting that very day at her very company. What's more, thanks to a (slightly implausible) mistake by an over-zealous underling, Romy has been signed up without her knowledge to act as a mentor to one lucky intern, and Samuel has lost no time in claiming her. It's just the first in a series of quick-moving incursions he makes.

Not that Romy does much to fend him off. With every self-confident volley he sends her way – telling her at their first meeting "I think you like to be told what to do," ordering her onto all fours, insisting that she lap milk from a saucer, meeting for assignations in hotels despite the fact that Romy's married (and to Antonio Banderas, no less, who plays a theater director) – she offers only meager resistance, if any at all.

Things escalate, of course; soon he's showing up at her house in the country, or at her penthouse apartment in the city. When he squires a different woman to a company party – another of Romy's subordinates, as it happens – their sloppily-drawn boundaries between work and play are clearly dissolving, and it's not long before their secret affair is longer quite so secret. When one word from Samuel (or anyone else) could annihilate Romy's hard-won success, will she back off from the increasingly untenable situation? Or is the erotic thrill of danger and potential discovery just too great?

The movie leans hard into steamy, kinky territory, and Kidman and Dickinson bring the heat even as the inadequately formulated script melts away. There's a glancing subplot about Romy's lesbian daughter having an affair with someone other than her steady girlfriend, and a barely-there story thread about how Romy is a pioneer of female empowerment in a male-dominated industry who ought to be more of a role model. There's also more than a hint that Romy's nice-guy husband is something of a limp noodle; even before she meets Samuel, Romy's sneaking away just after sex with him to get off for real with porn on her laptop.

The movie feels like some sort of retro lunkhead hetero fantasy until a dazzling payoff, when Kidman shows us what Romy is really made of, and why she's in charge of a major company.

Still – and not to shame anybody's kink – the movie spends so much time reading like a retrograde fantasia (grindhouse-style sex with a gloss of corporate correctness layered over it) that it's hard to fathom there's much of anything more than shock value being chased after here. Dickinson's Samuel is the sort of brilliant whiz kid who can scribble out the answer to how many ping-pong balls will fit in a conference room as a half-distracted exercise, but he comes across as so mechanical in his tactics of domination and so emotionally manipulative (he genuinely fails to understand what's objectionable about his conduct, though he's willing to hold Romy's over her head) that, except for some moments of fun seen in a montage, he seems like an almost-literal fuck machine – not so different from the robots that Romy's company trucks in.

Kidman, meantime, ends up competing with herself (specifically, her iconic turn in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"), and though her bravura twist salvages the film to a great degree she doesn't quite measure up now to what she so brilliantly accomplished then. In the end, this erotic "thriller" rises only to the level of not-quite-bold, roll-your-eyes camp.

"Babygirl" plays in theaters starting Dec. 25.