A friend described Halina Reijn’s Babygirl as the Basic Instinct for 2025. However, a couple of weeks after having watched it, I am still wondering what the hullabaloo over the picture has been all about. While Reijn may have had the same erotic intent in her new directorial venture as Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 sucker punch, she fails to knock the audience out.
There’s the shared premise between the two films of unbridled passion quickly morphing into a manipulative power play. In Babygirl, it is Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman), CEO of a robotics company, who is at the receiving end. Dissatisfied in her relationship with her theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas), she only has self-gratification to take recourse to till she gets into a dangerous liaison with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern at work.
His insistence on having her as his mentor leads to close encounters between the two of the steadily intimate and intense kinds. Things come to a head when he infiltrates her sacred spot—home and family. The fact that she is turning fifty and he is in his twenties complicates the situation, as does the boss-subordinate dynamic.
But is she the one taking advantage of him or is he maneuvering things by threatening to have her fired? Who is the one going beyond brief and out of line? Who is violating whom?
This gender and work hierarchy flip over, in the suppression-submission game, brings in a stark sense of ambiguity and disingenuousness to the film when it comes to issues of women’s rights and workplace discrimination, iniquities and toxicity.
Alongside there’s an ambivalent debate between ambition as opposed to morality and a woman employee, Esme, out to blackmail Romy to rise the corporate ladder herself. Throughout the 115 minutes of the film, I was scratching my head as to what it was trying to convey.
What was the point? If the idea was to underscore desire in older women, well it doesn’t even manage to scratch the surface and is content being facile than a fresh exploration. The convoluted set-up, confused characters, clunky dialogue (“You can sense things… What people want”) and a flimsy narrative that rushes to a sudden, implausible closure—involving the Kawasaki office in Japan of all the things—make it worse.
So then, if the idea of the film was to not address any human profundities but to just cater to the voyeurism in viewers, it fails on that count as well. There is barely any good communication, forget sizzling chemistry, between the icy beauty of Kidman and the diabolical cuteness of Dickinson. On top of it, the film does an utter disservice to Banderas.
Not only is he criminally wasted as a mere prop to foreground the dilemmas of his unfulfilled wife, but the charismatic actor is totally miscast in the part, the last person one can imagine who’d be plagued with performative issues in bed.
What reached out to me was the camera’s unintended focus on some aspects of ageing through Kidman—how your hands can grow old and wrinkle faster than your face. And all that has stayed with me of this eminently forgettable, stilted and tedious film is Harris “Babygirl” Dickinson dancing to George Michael’s “Father Figure”.
Then again, I wonder if it has to do with his tantalising moves or sheer nostalgia for the pop icon that Michael was for someone of my vintage.