Babygirl Just Isn’t An Erotic Thriller
Warning: This piece involves description of Babygirl’s ending. Spoilers ahead.
Babygirl is bookended by the orgasms of Romy Mathis, a highly visible CEO of a tech company with the kind of moneyed, idyllic life whose enviable surface always hides a stunning lack of fulfillment. Played by Nicole Kidman, she is married to the loving theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), who is more engaged in her interiority than she is in his. Her wardrobe primarily consists of cool beiges, slate grays, creams, and ochres. She lives in a luxe high rise apartment and an upstate home on plush acreage; what she has in obvious material wealth, she lacks in sexual and sensual satisfaction.
That first orgasm, a brittle, unenthusiastic moan rippling as the A24 logo fills the screen, isn’t so much experienced as performed. Kidman plays Romy as hyper-focused on convincing Bandera’s character that she is finding pleasure: the tossing of her hair (or more accurately, the splintered broom bristles that operate as Kidman’s atrociously stiff wig), the breathiness of her vocal delivery, the offhanded coolness of her “love you” in response to his “I love you” that communicates a distance lurking between them, apparently unbeknownst to him. Their sexual dynamic is clear: He initiates, she keeps quiet about what she truly wants. Later, we come to learn she’s never had a real orgasm with him in their 19 years as a couple.
Romy doesn’t wait for her husband’s sweat to dissipate before jumping from bed, vaulting to the other side of her minimalist abode, and opening her laptop to watch porn while masturbating on the floor. Here, her moan is raw and guttural. It’s akin to the final orgasm of the film, which she finally, actually experiences with her husband, after a primal truth about what she really craves is slowly revealed to him over the course of the movie: she wants to be told what to do. In Babygirl, the girlboss isn’t being vilified or even critiqued, but explored with a canny interest.
What precedes the final orgasm is a cool-eyed look at a middle-aged white woman with great influence who risks her marriage and her relationship to her children all in order not to be remade by desire but hopefully revealed by it. All thanks to a new presence that stuns her out of her regimented stupor: Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an assertive new intern at her company with whom she begins a BDSM-tinged affair. His toying and obvious attraction to her awakens something within Romy. Consider an early exchange when she asks how he calmed an unleashed black dog running havoc-fueled on a New York City street.
Samuel: I gave him a cookie.
Romy: You always have cookies on you?
Samuel: Yeah … why? Do you want one?
Babygirl is about the various forms of power that shape the interpersonal — and how that power is cultivated, maintained, and wielded, particularly within the bounds of heterosexual relations. The film’s writer-director, Halina Reijn, has crafted a movie with a supreme handling of structure, but it never thrilled me or turned me on. It doesn’t function from the gut in the ways erotic thrillers of yore did, tapping into base cinematic pleasure centers. That’s because Babygirl isn’t an erotic thriller, it operates moreso as a chilly women’s picture — if women were allowed to fuck in women’s pictures, that tricksy subgenre that was momentarily a powerful force in 1940s and ‘50s cinema cementing stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford. Babygirl has some crucial hallmarks of that classic Hollywood mode: a melodramatic plot that places a morally ambiguous woman’s concerns at its center — though Babygirl’s melodrama is subdued in favor of stately psychological introspection. These detours might make you think Babygirl is an erotic thriller, but it ultimately lacks the genre’s signature emotional thrust. Reijn simply throws tepid dom-sub dynamics into the mix, which makes for at least minimal intrigue, but ultimately ends up lifting different narrative weights.
To start with, the sex scenes: they might be well-choreographed, but they never quite overheat. The playful, awkward negotiations between Samuel and Romy at the beginning of their tryst shrewdly communicate the difficulties of turning a flush of desire into action. That felt authentic. But there is little fire here beyond what Kidman is trying to produce; not even the sensual dance cast against a George Michael song gets feverish. The film is otherwise measured, outright crisp in its cerebral plunge into the liminal spaces of modern sexuality. The very light BDSM power plays, the notion of threatened domesticity, all the arguments and ruptures are not easily pinned down or morally untangled. This is a film marked by ambiguity — which is its strength overall, even if there are crucial times in the film the narrative would be better served by directness. This is doubly true of the ending, which brings to the fore undeniable symmetry, but also a consideration that kept gnawing at me throughout the film: why is cinema so keen on exploring female sexuality primarily through abjection?
By abjection, I am talking about a kind of sexuality primed on crossing borders that calls into question the nature of consent and autonomy. The kind of sexuality that doesn’t easily square with beliefs that women need to be faultless and every corner of our lives must adhere to prevailing (and individualistic) liberal-feminist beliefs. The kind of sexuality that finds pleasure in the fear that comes from sexual experiences that threaten the symbolic and material order of a woman’s life. Babygirl, for all its craft, is an unsatisfying exploration of the ways in which women are emptied of their sexual responsibility, and conditioned to primarily come to understand themselves through the eyes of a man. I genuinely believe healing and understanding can be found within romance and great sex; you can’t self-love yourself into breaking the noxious patterns that guide your relationships, and a sense of personal desire often comes into view in sexual experiences with other people. But when so much of the outré sexuality of women portrayed on-screen exists in this lane, it grates.
The impulse toward sexual submissiveness is understandable — it’s a position, I imagine, is more common, regardless of gender, in an era of information overload, when you have to make taxing decisions multiple times a day, and to be lifted of that responsibility is freeing. But I don’t want films to merely or even primarily reflect real life. Why can’t we culturally envision women’s sexuality within heterosexual relationships as one of asserting their own desires rather than being taught them? Are we still so deeply uncomfortable with watching a man dominated sexually by a woman, whereas women being dominated and brought low by their desires is more palatable? I’m not saying these experiences aren’t shared by women. I just question the fantasies women are repeatedly sold.
Namely because Romy’s sexual abjection is riddled with empty contradictions that demonstrate the limitations of the script. It is initially freeing for Romy to be told what to do by Samuel, to be made animalistic by her desires. Their affair is tentative at first. He laughs when he demands for her to get on her knees in their first sexual encounter at a tacky hotel. But they start to find a rhythm. They have sex in Romy’s corner office bathroom, in swankier hotels. He tells her to take off her panties and spread her legs, and she does. He beckons her to lap milk from a saucer like his own personal sex kitten. She does. They crash into each other, pushing boundaries away like smoke from their eyes. But this affair is also imprisoning, for the price of all she has acquired hangs in the balance of each kiss, each touch.
The suggestion that Romy could lose everything at any moment is reaffirmed by Samuel’s dialogue and a pointed conversation with an older male power player in her company who makes allusions to knowing what happened with her (now former) intern near the end of the film. But there’s never a moment that felt all that bracing. After a certain point, the idea of her losing everything wasn’t glaring but ambient to the story. The film is remarkably soft on Romy, even though she puts herself at risk again and again: having sex with Samuel in her office bathroom, getting an expensive hotel with him for a night-long tryst, flittering through intimate situations with Samuel where prying eyes would love to feast. The film cares more for Romy’s enveloping sense of self than the depths of her immorality. Even that understanding of Romy’s character is thinly drawn, only given real shape due to Kidman’s skill as an actress and her history. (How can you not think of Eyes Wide Shut when watching this movie?) We’re told Romy grew up in cults and communes in an off-hand line she delivers, a threadbare fact that’s meant only to bring some shading as to why Romy believes her vanilla needs are so “dirty.” In my first viewing, I believed her affair with Samuel was a means of self-revelation. But by the end of the film — and certainly during my second viewing — it felt more like self-negation. She’s emptying herself of history, allowing Samuel to treat her as a vessel.
Both Dickinson and Kidman go full throttle toward this vulnerability. He carries the charm of a man who doesn’t have any idea how young he is or what awaits him in that vast, unknowable dark of deeper adulthood. Dickinson’s line readings are barbed yet beckoning, delivered with wild subtext bubbling just beneath the surface of his speech. But Dickinson’s performance remains stuck somewhere between an outright projection and a portrait of a more fully realized, wounded young man. Kidman, in turn, plays Romy as a woman overcome by her own needs but unwilling to look at them directly. Unfortunately, even with the actor’s commitment I find both figures underwritten, too ill-defined to make Babygirl a true character study, in the same way the film is too sedate to be deemed an outright erotic thriller. By the time their characters discuss choosing a safeword, an hour and fourteen minutes into the film, it’s evident the forces and figures in Romy’s life are on a collision course: Romy suggests the safeword be her husband’s name, Jacob.
Romy’s affair finally punctures her life in the last twenty-five minutes of the film, when Romy’s assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) shows up at her home: “I know what’s going on between you and Samuel.” It isn’t a fiery collision but a snag. A momentary ruffle in the otherwise smooth pleats of Romy’s overly-tended life. Romy first plays coy, but she drops the facade, “You’re confusing ambition with morality,” she tells Esme, who responds, “I have no interest in taking you down, okay? Fuck. You’re one of the few women who made it to the top. My interest is in keeping you there. Not as you are now. But as a version of you I can look up to.” Esme forgoes a generic entreaty at the feet of her girlboss and instead makes a cunning personal plea for better judgment from her mentor. But is it surprising to anyone that a white woman of Romy’s ilk wouldn’t just lack a certain morality, but never choose to possess it?
Ultimately, Romy confesses to Jacob she had an affair, though she refuses to be wholly honest with him or herself. She says the affair was a one-off fling with a stranger. It is telling that in trying to explain her “dark, dark thoughts” and the desires that led her to threaten the unity of her household, she struggles to find the right language. She still can’t describe what she wants. Jacob reaches his limit and kicks her out of the house. She flees to the upstate home, only to wake one evening to find Samuel swimming in her pool. “Did I mess with your head?” she asks him. “Yeah … but I messed with yours too. We’re equally responsible.”
The reconnection that Esme warned would never happen finds its tenderness dashed by the sudden appearance of Jacob. First the viewer notices his shadowed form rooted in the doorway, then Romy does. Soon enough things get ugly. Jacob is rightfully pissed for being lied to two times over. Samuel and Jacob become a furious tangle of limbs, punches thrown, wounds tended with frozen vegetables. Jacob believes Romy “used and abused” Samuel, that her fantasies are not quite her own. “That’s a dated idea of sexuality. I’m sorry you don’t understand,” Samuel counters. Samuel could easily be deemed more progressive sexually, but he’s also someone who tells Romy, “You know I don’t want a girlfriend if that’s what you’re afraid of. Because you look like a mother and I’m not interested in that.”
Jacob has his own contradictions — or, at least, he should. He’s a loving, engaged husband who hasn’t clocked that his wife has faked all her orgasms for almost two decades. When, after Jacob has returned to the city and the theater where he works and Romy seeks him out to apologize, he doesn’t say a word. The scene feels like a flimsy ellipsis rather than the long held exhale it should. And the final scene, in which Romy truly opens up sexually with Jacob, all the while imagining Samuel with the black dog, reads strangely ephemeral. The thin characterization beyond Kidman — the opaqueness of the world around her — is also a tell. The men in women’s pictures — especially the husbands — are archetypes. They are simply screens upon which ideas about patriarchal control and the increasingly complicated nature of heterosexual pairings play out.
For erotic thrillers to work, all characters involved in the centralizing relationship(s) need to be more than socio-cultural screens. They have to be people. Raw-nerved, ravenous, and revealing in every gesture. They need to feel mordant in the observations their lives dramatically bring to the fore. In Babygirl, Romy’s mind is the intellectual playground; meanwhile, Jacob isn’t been given so much as a stray line to explain why he remains so committed to her, or why she would recommit to him. He isn’t a counterweight, he’s too seemingly perfect. And so Babygirl is less about Female Sexuality broadly, and more, even if accidentally so, about white women’s sexual anxieties. What they feel they are losing as the pedestal that has always propped up their narrow rendition of femininity becomes hobbled as they dare to age. Babygirl and its shifting tides of interpersonal relationships indeed make it intellectually worthwhile to consider, but the film is drafty, even as a half-formed women’s picture. I hunger for more radical visions of female sexuality, the kinds that aren’t so cerebral about the nastiness of its female lead. The kinds that imagine women’s sexuality beyond the limitations of abjection. If film is used to picture wild worlds of a variety of hues and temperaments, why is there such a dearth exploring alternative forms of women’s becoming in middle age?