Review: As the boss of ‘Babygirl,’ Nicole Kidman does a bad, bad thing

Humans have made sex so complicated it’s a wonder anyone gets born. We wrestle with what we want, what we think we want, and what we want other people to think we want. (Not to mention what we think they want, which is how busybodies spend their time.) Our species puts itself under so much scrutiny that desire gets subverted by irony and shame, like someone who decides she’s too embarrassed to dress up for Halloween as a sexy nurse and instead goes as a sexy nun.

“Babygirl” is itself costumed as a sexual-empowerment story about a 50-something female CEO, Romy (Nicole Kidman), fulfilled by a dominant-submissive relationship with her intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson). A thorny pleasure by the filmmaker Halina Reijn, this Manhattan-set movie starts with Romy’s fake orgasm and ends with a real one. Her narrative arc is an O.

Eight years into the #MeToo movement, our reaction to the plot could fall anywhere on a spectrum between “Yaaaas queen” to “How hypocritical!” No one’s clamoring to see a movie about a male exec happily bedding his female underling. Here, Romy and Samuel agree on simple terms. “I tell you what to do and you do it,” he says. Sounds straightforward, but both know their affair is happening in a cultural minefield where the trip wires are economic, professional and generational. And nowadays, the intern recognizes his boss has the most to lose.

“Babygirl’s” erotic scenes are hot. But really, Reijn is doing her damnedest to get a moral rise out of us. Romy and Samuel have safe words, yet our own national conversation about sexual ethics gets tongue-tied whenever it tries to define right and wrong. Instead, we have Reijn asking uncomfortable questions.

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She hails from sexually liberated Amsterdam. Her first American film, the 2022 slasher “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” was a prank on Gen-Z and the self-righteous codes it clings to haphazardly. One of my issues with it was that Reijn didn’t seem to respect her characters. The film had style, but it felt misanthropic, trafficking in a retrograde nastiness that enjoyed killing off annoying jerks.

This film feels more mature. Reijn has empathy for Romy — more empathy than Romy has for anyone else. Her CEO would downsize the rest of us in a second, which is obvious from the opening minutes when she argues that this country’s employment problem is a “labor shortage.” Reijn, who is 49, knows that women her age were raised with one set of rules and came to power in more conscious times; Romy’s millennial employees inform her that vulnerability is now a positive. One refrain in the script is the younger workers repeatedly lecturing their elders — with impunity — to do better. Still, it’s a safe bet that Reijn believes these goody-goodies will grow up to make their own mistakes.

Romy’s company sells robots that pack and ship boxes, replacing human workers. In public, she swears that her corporation is improving lives, that her machines will give people back their time. She’s either delusional or lying. Either way, even in her own home, Romy spends more time with her phone than with her two teenage children and husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas).

It’s tempting to see the film as a character study, but there’s a lot about Romy that Reijn would rather not share. Romy’s assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), mentions that her boss grew up in a cult. We catch a glimpse of it in a quick flashback. But there’s no pathological “a-ha!” moment. Romy is who she is.

Yet Romy, with her monochrome clothes and youth-maxxed face and body, seems to see herself as a product to be engineered. By contrast, her turn-on words — “good girl,” “baby girl” — allow her to be weak and helpless. Kidman ascended in a Hollywood that mandated staying eternally young. She accepted those strictures even as her career leaned into fearless, messy provocations. So it’s brave to see her take on a role that makes her admit how much effort it takes to look like Nicole Kidman, as Romy dutifully checks herself in for cryotherapy as though she’s taking a car to the shop.

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Romy’s kids mock her efforts. (The eldest says her freshly botoxed mom looks like a dead fish.) But apart from that ribbing, there’s no way to twist her home life around so that she’s the victim. Banderas’ Jacob is loving and passionately attracted to her after 19 years of marriage, even if, despite being a theater director, he’s uneasy telling her what to do. Banderas allows the cinematographer Jasper Wolf to introduce him with a close-up of the gray in his beard, and then settles into the role of being the movie’s third wheel. (Perhaps he’s confident that we remember the kinks he got up to in “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”) Reijn repays his generosity with the kind of One Great Scene that people build a whole supporting-actor nomination around.

Samuel studies Romy until he picks up that his boss wants to be bossed around. He doesn’t spill much about himself, which makes us another participant in this sexual mind-reading game. If we turn that kind of focus around on Samuel, though, we can infer some things from deduction. First, people who are that good at sizing up strangers are either sociopaths or survivors. My money’s on the latter. At 6 feet 2, Samuel makes the other interns look like toddlers. He’s too old to have followed the prep-school-to-Ivy-League trajectory. His roots are in harsher soil. If that wasn’t clear from the rumpled blue button-down he wears in almost every scene, it’s in his delight when Romy books a posh suite and he gasps, “There’s a whole living room in here.”

The camera likes looking at Samuel, especially the wispy hairs on his chin, but Romy’s attraction to him is based on confidence, his way of cutting her down to mortal size. Samuel is a role that requires a real actor, which Dickinson is. He convinces us that Samuel is more a phalanx of abs, so much so that when he takes off his shirt, we’re focused only on the shock of his tattoos. There are mysterious initials, a cherub wearing a balaclava. Who is this guy?

Dickinson delivers such a layered performance that he could probably write a full biography of exactly who Samuel is. The only discordant note is a random insert when Samuel spies on Romy through her office window. As the string score starts having palpitations, “Babygirl” threatens to debase itself by becoming a throwback thriller. But it doesn’t do that — it doesn’t punish its characters at all — and it steadfastly refuses to become a romance, too. Neither character wants that anyway.

The smartest choice the film makes is that Samuel isn’t some “Fifty Shades of Grey” BDSM mastermind. He learns to control as she learns to submit. Their shared adventure plays out like two people learning to juggle while staring into each other’s eyes. Sometimes, it’s clumsy. Their first tryst starts off like a bad porno with Samuel and Romy improvising a script that feels phony even to them. They have to break the scene and start again, with Samuel trying to making Romy eat candy from his hand. She pauses. He’s frustrated. “Can you just try it?” he asks. The whole movie hinges on that awkward moment. Right there, Reijn decides that the strongest foundation for all of our species’ sex angst is simply consent. Forget right or wrong. “Babygirl’s” key question is yes or no.