Before we get to Babygirl, there is a burning question that begs to be asked — how many projects does Nicole Kidman manage to do at a time? Just in the last year or so, Kidman has packed in four films (A Family Affair, Spellbound, Holland, Babygirl) and two TV outings (Expats, The Perfect Couple). Significantly, dysfunctionality — of family, friendship, ethics, morality, intention — is a common thread that binds most of these titles. It is also the kind of theme, more often than not, that Kidman has been drawn to in most of her acting, as well as producing work, over the last few years.
These are interesting choices. For not only do they afford Kidman, an Oscar winner of the early 2000s and multiple Academy Award nominee over the years, the opportunity to play complex, layered women, it gives viewers flesh-and-blood characters... women who are flawed and real, and in ways both obvious and subliminal, relatable.
In Babygirl, Kidman's Romy Mathis is much more than all of that. A bit of an extraordinary woman caught in extraordinary circumstances, none of which she has been unwillingly thrust into. In her own words, uttered between tears at one point, she says she is "not normal", a claim that the mother of two makes more than once during the course of the film.
This is a film for which Kidman won Best Actress at the Venice International Film Festival last August and also earned a Best Actress nod from the National Board of Review where Babygirl was named among the Top 10 films of 2024. It is Kidman who holds Babygirl together, even when Romy — and the film in certain parts — tend to fall apart.
Directed by Danish filmmaker Halina Reijn, an exciting voice in alternative modern cinema, whose last film — the euphonically named, albeit in a twisted way, Bodies Bodies Bodies — was a rollercoaster ride that sparked conversations, Babygirl (which has just dropped on Prime Video) is a high-kink corporate drama in which Kidman plays a powerful woman who secretly yearns to be dominated, debased and humiliated. When we first see her, Romy is having steamy sex with her husband Jacob (a deliberately bland Antonio Banderas, if that could even be possible). She orgasms — or so we think — but when Jacob rolls over to get some shut eye, we see her scurry through the corridors of their home and into the study where she orgasms (this time for real) after watching porn on her laptop. It is a racy few opening minutes that sets the tone for the rest of the film.
THE WEAPONISATION OF SEX
Romy is then shown to be a no-nonsense power woman at work, the chief executive at a company that is looking to increasingly employ robots to make humans redundant. It foreshadows what Romy is about to turn into a few scenes later — a robot, whose remote control she places in the hands of the newly-recruited intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), with whom she enters into a dominant-submissive affair. It is an 'arrangement' that threatens to not only consume her, but also ruin the family life and public image she has painstakingly built over the years.
And yet, Reijn's film doesn't paint Romy as a victim. A woman who enjoys sex when it is "high-stakes", she is controlled because she allows herself to be controlled. She wants that excitement, that edginess in life that comes from her kinky sexual encounters with the young man. Is it some form of twisted agency? We aren't really sure.
But Romy isn't really one to be pitied. Her kids sometimes mock her efforts... the older one, at some point, says her freshly Botoxed mom looks like 'a dead fish'. But apart from that ribbing, there is no way to twist her home life around that says she is the victim. Even when she reveals it all to Jacob, she doesn't say she was coerced into it. The scene seems to be an indirect nod to Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut, that starred Kidman with ex-husband Tom Cruise. In that hallucinatory film, which opens at Christmas time just like Babygirl, Kidman plays a married woman who sends her husband (played by Cruise) spiraling after she tells him about her unconsummated desire for another man. “I was ready to give up everything,” she says.
In this film, too, the revelation leaves Jacob gutted. For Babygirl is, for all purposes, a story about women, bodies and the regulation of both, looking at what it means when a woman surrenders her most secret self. "I tell you what to do and you do it,” Samuel tells Romy. He is no jock, and there is a lopsided quality to the power he attempts to wield over her. "You are my babygirl," he whispers to her at one point. But who really has the power is the query Babygirl puts forth over and over again.
THE MALE vs FEMALE GAZE
An article in Variety asks if Babygirl could have been directed by a man and had the same impact? It is an intriguing, layered question to ponder on, especially in a post #MeToo world (which isn't really post, by the way). It says that a male director "couldn't have got away" with such a film in today's times, though Fatal Attraction and 9½ Weeks — sexually charged narratives that Reijn has quoted as influences — have both been directed by the same man, Adrian Lyne.
An important segment of the article sums it up with: "Knowing that there is a woman filmmaker behind the camera is part of the film’s sexual politics. Once Romy and Samuel, who seduces and dominates her by acting like a d**k, begin their forbidden affair, the relationship that gets played out is teeming with 'wrong' things. But the movie, though it wants to be sexy, isn’t exploiting those things; it’s exploring them. Its gaze is allied with a liberated vision."
WOMAN ON TOP
The relationship fizzles out as quickly as it fired up, with Romy, whose life and career seemed to be teetering on the edge, owning it once more. A glass of milk, a leitmotif running through the film, embodies this shift in power. While at the National Board of Review Awards, where she won the Best Actress trophy, Kidman acknowledged that in a rather different acceptance speech.
“I am going to raise a glass of milk to all of the baby girls in the room,” she said while lifting the glass high above her head at the podium. Cheers erupted in the room as Kidman sipped from the glass, guzzling the whole in mere seconds. “Good girl,” she said with a smile, before blowing a kiss as she walked off from the stage.
'Babygirl' to girl boss. In a Manhattan minute.