Romy Mathis, played by Nicole Kidman, allegedly grew up in a cult before she transitioned to becoming the head of a nuclear family, mostly traditional in every way except for her stake of power in it. Like everything in her life, her family is perfect on the outside and powered by the money she brings in as CEO of Tensile, a “robot business” in charge of warehouse delivery.
The opening A24 logo cuts to a comically loud orgasm and sex scene with Romy in control, setting our expectations for the film as a raunchy, lustful NSFW thriller.
Actually, no. Kidman was giving a meta performance, a climax-ception if you will, by essentially acting out her pleasure convincingly enough to fool even the cis women in the theatre, whose giggles intensified with every playful exchange. However, this fake orgasm was part of the first and only ‘real’ sex scene in the entire movie. Moments later, Romy crawls away from her unsatisfactory husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and curls into her laptop, furiously ‘watching’ submissive videos to feel the real thing.
Her need for submission spirals into an illicit love affair with twenty something intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who calms down a German Shepherd outside of her office and becomes the target of mutual obsession. Watching him take control of the dog is a catalyst to realising her desires to be ‘tamed’ and they quickly strike up a BDSM relationship based on an exchange of power.
“I think you like it when people tell you what to do,” Samuel says in one of their first private exchanges, a few scenes before ordering a tall glass of milk that she downs in one gulp without breaking eye contact. She’s left with a ‘got milk’ moustache that is clearly an innuendo.
After ditching her husband’s work event, she meets Samuel at a dingy motel where both of them don’t quite know what they’re doing. Her hesitation and his self conscious dominance are charming, a sweet take on two people exploring their sexuality together. Finally, the camera closes up on her face as she has another, this time real, orgasm face down on the motel floor, literally in the hands of Samuel.
We later find out that in her nineteen years of marriage, she has never, ever experienced an orgasm with Jacob, and he never does take the hint either , even when she angrily tells him to his face.
Perhaps it’s because her face shows no emotion? Halima Jibril writes for Dazed:
“Beyond being distracting, Botox and fillers can significantly impact the believability of an actor’s performance. An actor’s main job is to convey to the audience the emotions, thoughts and feelings the character is experiencing and tweakments block the face from producing the expressions and micro-expressions which help portray these. They also hinder believability when portraying characters from the past. “
As soon as I heard that Kidman was starring as a sexually empowered older woman, I knew I had to see Babygirl. The marketing screamed of boundary breaking and subversion, such as the infamous ‘drinking milk like a cat scene'(which was actually done in a cotton bathrobe and spliced between a montage). Kidman acts with a unique charisma and vulnerability, and has been in very sensual, controversial films like Eyes Wide Shut which explores fantasies and power abuse (and actually also features Christmas).
However, Babygirl‘s issue isn’t with the lack of nudity or sex scenes at all – a simple kiss or even a longing gaze can convey plenty of meaning in a G rated film. It was lacking the emotion and sensuality that we take for granted in other iconic erotic romances and thrillers.The botox wasn’t the only thing to blame for the film’s inability to convey emotion – Kidman is under patriarchal pressure to maintain her youth for her career – but the chemistry between the characters themselves was missing.
There simply isn’t much to analyse about Babygirl and, especially when you compare it to good film plots, the tension isn’t built up almost at all. By the middle of the movie, the audience is rooting for Jacob more than the main characters, and we’re denied the guilty pleasure of yearning for the morally deviant main characters to stay together. Usually, your heart pounds to see just one more kiss, even if it’s wrong, and it breaks when they split up, simply because of the magic they create on screen together, regardless of who they’re hurting. The day after watching it, I watched Hitman on Netflix, a dark thriller starring Glen Powell, and in 10 seconds of flirting, it was immediately sexier than Babygirl, even with the romance being a subplot.
While Babygirl does technically subvert the usual trope of a younger woman with an older powerful man, it is actually very mainstream in its exploration of women’s sexual oppression and taboos. Romy’s motives for this ‘sub/dom’ power play relationship didn’t really make sense, even as part of a fetish, because women already are sexually submissive and undermined, even if they are a billionaire CEO ; especially in Trump’s America. Her fetishistic desire to lose control of power is much more common for successful men who are usually never undermined. To really empathise with Romy, she needed to be a more complex character with an exploration of her desires and a clear assertion of Samuel’s sexual and cultural power over her. I get what the movie is trying to subvert, but it isn’t executed very well. If you so much as grabbed some popcorn, you may have missed the line “I grew up in a cult” and she even tells us there’s nothing deeper to her kink, that “it’s not my childhood” which made her that way. This is apparently just her. Also, she implies that her fantasies are dark and disturbing, when social media and pornography have sadly normalised female submission and male domination to the point that there was online discourse about ‘vanilla shaming‘ a couple years ago.
There was no emotional expansion outside of Romy’s sexual desires, and we learn virtually nothing about Samuel at all. This could have been resolved with some flashbacks, deeper dialogue or even a few more facial expressions. The only ones conveying anything deeper than lust were Jacob and Esme, two side characters that we could empathise with more than the main ones
This lack of tension or build up wasn’t just important to the story, but also made everything kind of clinical and unsexy. I wondered if it was the mood I was in on the day that I watched it, but even sitting next to my boyfriend, there was no tension, only awkwardness. Kidman stated in an interview that she was inspired by Baz Luhrmann’s use of sex scenes and montages to further the plot, rather than let the audience “get their rocks off”. This is a fair point, but sex scenes can communicate emotion and meaning, rather than just serving as a form of voyeurism.
The golden rule of cinema, ‘show, not tell’, never came into fruition. Romy kept insisting that Samuel had a particularly keen sense of what people desire, as if he had some kind of sixth sense into her soul. Their subversive power dynamic wasn’t fully established or justified because they had to keep explaining why it was that he had power over her as a ‘victim’ who could report her and make her lose everything, when realistically he could be silenced with a few sharky lawyers (especially as she had done nothing illegal or particularly scandalous, other than crawling on all fours like a dog). Beyond sex, his power over her was never convincing, and even in the bedroom it seemed force. The depth and soul of the characters wasn’t in the cinema with us and there was no insight into what made Samuel or Romy tick.
If anything, Esme, one of the supporting characters and Romy’s assistant, was the most interesting and actually had a morally grey motive. She balanced her support of Romy as a woman in power with her ambition to get to the top as a woman of colour in the corporate world. Some TikTok users compiled intricate theories that added depth to the plot, such as Esme being Samuel’s ‘dominant’ who had planned this all along to gain power (which allegedly explains why he was so uncomfortable with being a dom). However, other than the total lack of evidence for this, if you have to analyse the details of why a film is groundbreaking or subversive, then it’s just not a great movie.
Even if we compare this to other objectively good plots, the complete lack of suspense or meaning is disappointing. As an art piece, it doesn’t require a clear beginning, middle or end, but the affective features and dialogue provoked no emotion in the audience to the extent that you practically don’t care about what happens, even with some pretty high stakes for Romy hanging in the balance. One of the most moving scenes was when Jacob contronts the two in their country house, and Samuel calms him from a panic attack. You can see that he is a caring, emotionally intelligent person, but what exactly is the message that they’re trying to convey from this? He’s literally never seen by the audience again after this.
Just like Romy, Babygirl never reaches a climax. It’s like we’re living in her marriage. I found myself waiting for something to happen and then realising the movie was almost over. There was half an hour left and I was waiting for the big twist, and then suddenly there was only ten minutes left and nothing had happened. Was this it? Why did XO Kitty, a G-rated Netflix series, make me me yearn more than the biggest erotic thrillers of the year?
We can live with being sexually catfished (recall Guadagnino’s Challengers), but this felt like one of those ‘him on text vs him in person’ memes. Challengers didn’t have sex but it made us want, need, and desire with the characters, and it built the tension between three people to explore complex relationships.
What director Halina Reijn did well was the aesthetics. The rave scene was a highlight of A24’s signature cinematography , and arguably the lack of obvious sexual arousal was the entire point of subversion that Babygirl hangs on, as the female gaze often takes centre stage as Romy ‘finds herself’. Even in her most erotic moments, Kidman’s body is artistically covered, her face is the focus, and it was usually her watching Harris Dickinson, whose dance scene to Goerge Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ was simply…right. Interspersing moments of voyeurism from her gaze complicated their power dynamic by letting her be ‘the watcher’ instead of dancing for him, and reminding us that she is actually a mother figure to him, if only that was further explored.
I also enjoyed the fact that she ultimately gets away unscathed, just like a man would, and tells one of her sleazy subordinates to literally “f**k off” and get out of her office. The last thing we’re shown is Nicole finally opens up to Jacob and he’s willing, unsurprisingly, to try things her way.
This is as happy an ending as we could have hoped for, but it literally could have been an email. Jacob, while pretty vanilla, demonstrated his love for Romy throughout the film and is literally an artsy director, so it was hard to believe that he would have been disgusted by her mild taboos and so straight laced that he’d never try them. He was disgusted by her cheating, not her kinks. Why did it take 2 hours of our life to basically read a confessional in a magazine advice column that ends in “if they love you, they would”? What was the point of all of this, other than the existential passage of time? And what do we make of the ‘twist’ at the end with Samuel and the dog?
If nothing else, I guess we found another mid-tier ‘Christmas movie’ and a new hot actor to fixate on that’s actually from this generation. I think it’s time we brought back yearning and sensuality to Hollywood.
My Goddess Complex 
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