Venice Film Festival 2024 – Babygirl ★★★

Release: 10 January 2025 (UK)

Director: Halina Reijn

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas, Harris Dickinson

Nicole Kidman is one of the best actresses working today. She is also one of the most beautiful. Tall, statuesque and stylish, her beauty harks back to the Hollywood goddesses of yesteryear. She was perfect as the intoxicating Satine in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. But she has never had the sultry presence of a contemporary like, say, Angelina Jolie. So, her forays into exploring female sexuality on screen have tended to come across as strangely cerebral. Babygirl is no different. For all the hype about the ‘X rated’ scenes, the film is curiously unsexy. 

It touches upon all the right ‘issues’ and is determined to provoke conversations and media discussion about female desire, power balances in relationships, what is and isn’t predatory behaviour, consent, age gap sexual liaisons, fidelity and generational views on sex. 

However, as with many ‘issue’ films, Babygirl loses out on the characters and the story. Neither is quite convincing enough to fully care about. 

Kidman is Romy Mathis, a top CEO (is there any other kind in movies)? She’s strong and tough except she crumbles like a wafer in a cup of tepid tea the moment she’s challenged. At home she’s been happily married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas) for 19 years except she’s been sexually unsatisfied all that time and has never had an orgasm with him. 

Let’s just pause there for a moment. Banderas is one of the hottest actors in cinema, so that’s a tough sell from the offset. But he’s playing against type. Not really. He has frightfully little to do in this role that it seems hardly worth the effort to take on a persona audiences don’t associate with you.

The couple have two daughters; a bratty dancer type younger one and a teenage lesbian with a bad mullet who holds the family’s share of common sense and wisdom under it. The top CEO packs the children’s lunches, she dutifully has intimate relations with her unsatisfactory husband on a regular basis and is a model wife and mother. She is the stereotypical woman who has it all. Except she craves more.

That more comes in the shape of a hunky new intern in her company, Samuel (Harris Dickinson). She is instantly attracted and impressed by his confident ways, seeing him calm a wild dog at their first unplanned meeting (which likely was not unplanned, at all). The wild dog that can only be tamed by him is symbolic of what she wants him to do to her. And that’s the central issue in this film. A woman who has everything longs to be submissive to a man. For all the highbrow talk of female empowerment, female desire and existential crisis, it’s this that the film centres around.

So, to the strains of George Michael’s Father Figure, we get carefully filmed and edited sex scenes in which Matthis is told to beg, get down on her knees, to take off her clothes and so on. The film is not visually explicit although Matthis is the only one who gets naked. 

Take away these scenes and the film is just a conventional story about infidelity. “I have power over you, “Samuel tells Matthis. “I can make one call and it’s all over for you.” He even tells her that he thinks she wants to lose everything. 

There are various attempts throughout to suggest that the power balance swings back and forth. So, at different points Mathis reminds Samuel she is the one in charge due to her higher level, boss status. Matthis’ assistant Esme knowingly tells her boss that she should be a role model for other women, especially younger ones, and there’s a slimy male co-worker around too who makes his pitch when he discovers what Mathis is up to.

But ultimately, the film is a pretty conventional story about infidelity. The real danger for Matthis is not to do with her sexual desires but that she will lose her marriage if her lover turns up at the family home, that she will lose her job if he screams foul. 

Babygirl is essentially a domestic drama with a few racy parts (that aren’t all that racy) and unsubtle discussion points that don’t go anywhere.