Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. 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. Their sexual dynamic is clear: He initiates, she keeps quiet about what she truly wants.
Here, her moan is raw and guttural. 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. Babygirl is about the various forms of power that shape the interpersonal โ and how that power is cultivated, maintained, and wielded, particularly within the bounds of heterosexual relations. 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.
