Babygirl review: Nicole Kidman’s erotic film is not as hot as it thinks it is

Hype works both ways.

You want to get people excited, tell them about your project and its point of difference, especially when you think you have made an irreverent film about sexual desire, shame and kinks. It’s so subversive, goes the preamble.

The problem with that is then audiences are expecting something shocking and unprecedented, and Babygirl is not that.

It’s good, but its execution does not match its ambitions and it’s also, perhaps its ultimate sin, not that… horny.

What is arousing for some is not for others, and sex is perhaps one of the most subjective experiences we can have. Babygirl wants to be challenging and incendiary, and it could’ve been all those things if it had a clearer through-line of what it’s really trying to say.

What it does have is a superb performance from Nicole Kidman who plays Romy, a woman with so unsatisfying a sex life that after coitus with her husband (Antonio Banderas), she takes herself off to another room to masturbate.

Romy is the chief executive of a robotics processing business, which is a significant if obvious metaphor. Get it? We’re all sleepwalking through our lives, automating our actions and our emotions.

Among the crop of new interns at her company is Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a confident and enigmatic young man who’s not intimidated by Romy nor does he show her much professional deference.

Risking her marriage and her career, the two embark on a clandestine affair with shades of BDSM. Romy wants to be dominated. Her kink is less about physical sexual contact and more about being told what to do.

This can include drinking a glass of milk at a bar, in the film’s most viral moment, or crawling around on the floor like a dog (Romy first encounters Samuel on the street when he takes control of a wayward dog).

There are also scenes of the more convention sexy times — frenzied copulation in a bathroom — but the most charged scenes are the ones without physical contact. Samuel’s approval, “Good girl”, is enough to make Romy melt.

Writer and director Halina Reijn has spoken about how Babygirl is about power and control, the way it shifts between people and who has one over on whom and at what moment.

This would be more interesting if we knew more about Samuel, who is, frustratingly, deliberately obscured from the audience. If he is supposed to be merely a functionary for Romy to explore the repressed parts of herself, then it’s hard to empathise with his perspective. The exchange of power only works if we understand who has it and why.

There are also the supporting characters — the husband, and a junior work colleague (Sophie Wilde) — who muddies up the power dynamics in a way that is not as effective as the film suggests.

What works is Kidman’s performance. The Australian actor has always been game to try different things, play challenging roles and embodying characters who have flaws, and Romy is a great role for her. In her hands, that character is thorny and strange, a woman awakening to how shame has kept her from being honest, and the freedom and release her real desires bring.

You understand Romy and how she’s feeling, even if not always her relationship to the rest of the film. That character feels like an island.

It’s also wonderful to see Kidman do something that isn’t another rich lady with family traumas and secrets, which has been her ken for the past few years. This is the Kidman we’ve seen in Eyes Wide Shut, To Die For, Rabbit Hole and Margot at the Wedding — raw.

Mainstream American filmmaking has become more puritanical in the past decade, dominated by sexless, all-audiences action blockbusters with barely even a peck on the cheek let alone any eroticism. Some of that is commercial realities and some of that is not.

Babygirl is supposed to be an answer to that, and while it doesn’t have the clarity or heat of something like Steven Shainberg’s 2002 BDSM film Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, at least it’s trying to have a conversation about a taboo, in some quarters, subject.

It’s just a bit of a confusing chat.

Rating: 3/5

Babygirl is in cinemas