A high-powered CEO embarking on a forbidden office affair with a much younger intern is the premise of many an erotic thriller. And yet, you’ve never seen one like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl.
Fresh off the success of her first English-language hit, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Reijn gender-flips the script on cinema’s most controversial genre — one dominated by sexist stereotypes, gratuitous female nudity, and boiling bunnies — recruiting Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson to investigate sexual hangups – both personal and universal. A tense, psychoanalytic experiment flush with gasping orgasms, rug-burned knees, and bathroom floor hookups, Reijn’s contribution to our constantly evolving argument surrounding sex and its place on screen is more cerebral and intimate than you might expect.
“I thought it’d be great therapy,” she jokes of writing and directing the film for A24 when we spoke with her recently. “I thought, ‘I want to make something about consent and power and sex and control and surrender and just everything that I’m ashamed and scared of.’”
That fear manifests in the boardroom and the bedroom of Kidman’s Romy, an uber-successful executive at a robotics company who seemingly has it all… except easy and regular access to mind blowing orgasms from her devoted husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). But this movie is not about the Banderas character (though he adds life and color to every scene he’s in). It’s not even about Dickinson, whose dark, enigmatic Samuel feels like a barely leashed animal, even when he’s taming wild dogs on the streets of New York.
No, this is Kidman’s show — a spiritual successor to Eyes Wide Shut that puts her firmly in control — and Romy’s story and Heijn’s reversal of everything she views as backwards when it comes to how women and their desires have been treated – on screen and off.
“What in us is a beast and what in us is civilized? What is animalistic and what is enlightened? That’s what connects all of my work,” she summarizes. “Why is everything inside myself so conflicting? Why do I want to be a feminist and be degraded in the bedroom? Of course, that’s just a metaphor. Not everyone likes to be degraded in the bedroom. But I think everybody can relate to feeling very conflicting layers within your own personality. Sometimes it’s very hard to bring light to that, so it’s about trying to find a way to be closer to your authentic self without shame.”
The movie hinges on Kidman’s ability to bring that internal struggle to life, manifesting her diametrically opposed urges in increasingly physical ways. Romy begins as a tightly-wound tradwife, donning different masks at home and in the workplace, switching between performative orgasms, domineering matriarchal tendencies, and stereotypically masculine corporate speak with apparent ease. But it’s all wearing on her, taking its toll as she sneaks off in the dead of night to pleasure herself to daddy porn or makes a rooftop escape during an office holiday party. She pokes and prods and tightens and cryofreezes her body to fit a standard of perfection meant to make her desirable to others without ever fully-realizing her own deep-seated carnal needs. That pent-up frustration and lustful hunger finally finds a release through her inappropriate relationship with Samuel, a disarming, almost anarchic figure vibrating with an intensity that’s mesmerizing and off-putting in equal measure. In motel rooms and five-star suites and grimy back alleys, the two share a raw intimacy – Romy crawling (literally, on hands and knees) her way to Reijn’s vision of an authentic self, Samuel stumbling his way through a power dynamic, thrilling, terrifying, and completely foreign to him.
Every squeeze and tug and slap is met with even more glimpses of tenderness and suggestive sensuality. But the thing Reijn is especially proud of? The surprising lack of sex scenes in her “sexiest film of the year” contender.
“My movie doesn’t have a lot of actual sex in it,” she confirms. It is all suggestion. And that is what I think a lot of women are actually hungry for, because for us, sex is a story. Sex is foreplay, sex is in the mind, sex is imagination.” It’s here she references two of the film’s most bizarre scenes, both using milk as a metaphorical milemarker in Romy and Samuel’s erotic adventure. “A lot of people talk about the milk, and the milk is so sexual to me. We are playing with the old cliches in a fun way, using them as tools for their kink and seeing how far they can take it. I love sex scenes that are more suggestive than just two bodies banging into each other. For me, that doesn’t tell me anything.”
That’s likely one reason Babygirl has earned its feminist chops. As often as Kidman exposes herself (physically and emotionally), Reijn’s gaze is steadfastly female.
“We live in a patriarchal society so we’re still exploring what the ‘female gaze” even is,” she explains. “Do we even know because we’ve internalized the male gaze for so long? If you look in the mirror, the question is, ‘What do you see?’ Do you look at yourself through male eyes or female eyes? I think almost every straight woman looks at herself through male eyes without realizing it.”
Correcting that on-screen doesn’t simply mean mirroring past work with scenes that reverse gender roles – though Reijn does that brilliantly with a Dickinson dance montage set to George Michael’s “Father Figure” halfway through the film. “The female gaze should transcend just doing it the opposite way,” according to Reijn, morphing into something that feels more authentic, honest, and devoid of inherent gender bias.
Directing an erotic thriller in that vein meant Reijn relied on Kidman’s fearlessness, Dickinson’s creative curiosity, and the professional mediation of an intimacy coordinator to make sure the set was a safe and comforting one for her actors and crew. After Anora actress Mikey Madison made headlines for turning down the option to work with an intimacy coordinator while portraying a sex worker in Sean Baker’s gritty dramedy, an actor’s autonomy on set came into question. Who should be making these decisions and why? For Reijn, there’s a simple answer.
“I am against any movie that says we have a lot of sex, and the actors didn’t want the intimacy coordinator,” she says. “I’m so excited that we have structure now when it comes to intimacy scenes and I think it should be just as mandatory as using a stunt coordinator. I think some directors and actors still think that it will take away from their autonomy as creators. The opposite is true.”
She’s also a firm believer in rewarding women – even flawed ones – who have the courage to break the molds of civility to unapologetically embrace their own power. Unlike so many other heroines on screen, Romy’s liberation is not a punishment, her reward doesn’t come at the expense of everything else that she holds important in her life. For once, a woman’s self-actualization isn’t found in the wreckage of her self-destruction.
“So before I started writing, I knew one thing: I wanted to start and end with an orgasm,” Reijn explains. “I wanted to start with a fake one and end with the real thing. I wanted to create a movie with a happy ending, figuratively and literally speaking, because I wanted to have everybody leave the cinema with hope and joy, wanting to celebrate their authentic self.”
“For me, this movie is a warning. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you suppress your inner beast. When you don’t have the courage to be honest about yourself, then you will find it in risky, dangerous places and you’ll start to hurt yourself. You’ll start to hurt others. [We] need to communicate, to [embrace] what we’re afraid of so we can really connect with each other.”
