Producers: David Hinojosa, Julia Oh and Halina Reijn   Director: Halina Reijn   Screenplay: Halina Reijn   Cast: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde, Esther McGregor, Victor Slezak, Vaughan Reilly, Leslie Silva, Gaite Jansen, Izbel Mar, Anoop Desai, Bartley Booz, Maxwell Whittington Cooper and Dolly Wells    Distributor: A24

Grade: C

There’s a rather suffocating quality to Halina Reijn’s so-called erotic thriller about a successful female CEO of a major corporation, a wife and mother, who submits to demeaning treatment at the hands an arrogant intern capable of fulfilling her deepest sexual needs, as her loving husband cannot.  “Babygirl” is artfully made, fearlessly acted by its star, and—as befitting a tale of compulsive behavior—compulsively watchable.  But all the kinkiness seems to be happening in a vacuum, as far as the audience is concerned; we’re given little insight into why the characters do what they do—who they are, emotionally.  While their tough sex, portrayed in very explicit terms, is cinematically compelling, watching it leaves us as empty as the couple—one hesitates to call them lovers—appear to be, except for what the actors can insinuate about their inner lives.

The woman is Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman), who runs Tensile, a company that operates a robotic-delivery service.  She’s married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a Broadway theatrical director, and they have two teen daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly)—not to mention a fabulous Manhattan apartment and a lovely country home. 

But she’s discontented.  After a bedroom session with Jacob, she retreats to another room, unsatisfied, and masturbates to on-line porn. The next day as she’s walking to her sterile office, a dog that’s escaped its owner comes rushing at her on the sidewalk; the crowd scatters and she’s paralyzed with fright.  But a young man (Harris Dickinson) calms the animal down and returns it to the owner.  Romy is both relieved and impressed. 

She’s also surprised to learn that the young dog-whisperer is Samuel, one of her firm’s new crop of interns who, during her meet-and-greet with the group, poses a pointed question about whether she really believes, as she’s argued, that automation and sustainability go hand-in-hand.  Romy’s assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) quickly hustles him, and the others, away, but it’s but the first instance in which this tall fellow with a constant hint of malicious humor in his eyes will act insolently toward her.

Where the easygoing frat-boy cockiness comes from is never discussed; it’s simply there.  But Romy is fascinated with Samuel even though at every chance meeting he makes some vaguely insulting or intrusive observation.  She puts on a show of annoyance, but when during the office holiday party he takes off his tie while gyrating in a dance and drops it to the floor, she retrieves it, takes it to her suite and fondles it.  And when a glitch in the mentoring system adds her name to those interns can choose as their personal teachers, he alone chooses her; though she protests, she goes to the first scheduled meeting with him.  There his impudence again surfaces; she’s flustered but acquiesces when, as she departs, he kisses her. 

Thus begins an obviously unwise office affair, one that quickly veers into dominance not of her over him, but the reverse.  As he’ll later enunciate the rules, he’ll tell her what to do, and she’ll do it.  And she does, in hotel rooms tacky and opulent, even in her own house: she strips and kneels before him, stands naked in a corner when so ordered, acts like the dog he’d brought under control.  The relationship is reflected in quirky signs of domesticity: he sends her a glass of milk to drink, and dances before her to a needle drop suggestive of his status as father figure. 

The question, of course, is why Romy submits to such degrading treatment.  In confessing to Jacob later what she’s done, she tells him it comes from dark desires she’s had since childhood, but the explanation feels as simplistic and false to us as it does to him.  And why this man—who, as Dickinson plays him, is as shallow as he is arrogant?  Is he the first, or just the latest?  Is Romy the control freak, whose cool reserve at the office cloaks a steely resolve to succeed, simply blown away by the sort of toxic masculinity Samuel represents, succumbing to it after years and years of repressing her impulses, or has she given in to her lust before—outside of the office, perhaps?  We’re left to guess.  That’s the case with Samuel as well—we know next to nothing of his background, his inner life, his motives, besides his correct reading of Romy and his willingness to take advantage of it, even to making her jealous by dating Esme too—which ties in with a subplot about Romy’s resistance to discussing her assistant’s promotion while posing as a champion of women in the business world.

Whatever the case, Kidman gives a daring performance here, not only in the sexually charged sequences but throughout, unafraid to make us dislike Romy more than sympathize with her when, for instance, Samuel publicly demeans her after she seeks him out at the bar where he has a second job.  Her treatment of Jacob, whom Banderas plays with endearing incomprehension, is especially grating.  As for Dickinson, he captures Samuel’s bluff manner but doesn’t really go beyond it.  Handsome in a surprisingly ordinary fashion, the character comes across as little more than a vacuous vessel into which Romy can pour all her inchoate longing to be degraded and humiliated.

Actually, the moments that work best in “Babygirl” aren’t the extreme sexual ones.  One involves a thread that’s inevitable in a contemporary story about an office affair between a powerful person and an underling: the threat of legal action.  Romy brings up her reluctance to fire Samuel, but he responds by noting smugly that he could destroy her reputation and her career, an idea he returns to repeatedly to keep her in line.  The thread does actually have a payoff, but an unexpected one, leaving the film to close in a way that a viewer with find either refreshingly non-judgmental or unpleasantly honest given the realities of today—particularly when a coda gives Romy the opportunity to respond to a crude proposition from another executive at Tensile (Victor Slezak—or perhaps better here, Sleazak) with icy contempt.

There are a couple of other last-act scenes that have particular bite.  One is the inevitable confrontation between Samuel and Jacob, in which generational differences about sexual attitudes are tweaked in the bleakly humorously fashion the script often relies on.  The other is a pep talk that Isabel, a lesbian with her own relationship problems played by McGregor with infectious humor, has with her mother at an emotional low point.  It almost plays like a sly inverse of the famous conversation that Elio Perlman’s father has with his son toward the close of “Call Me By Your Name.”

“Babygirl” benefits from superb technical work from production designer Stephen Carter, costumers Kurt (Swanson) and Bart (Mueller) and cinematographer Jasper Wolf, who give the visuals a coolly elegant, often antiseptically modernist look, and editor Matthew Hannam, who gives voyeurs plenty to watch in the erotically-charged scenes (but discreetly) and points up the underlying sexual tension elsewhere.  Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s pulsating score adds to the vibe, its synth thumping perhaps meant to mimic the heavy breathing of sexual activity.  There are also a few cannily chosen needle-drops, though curiously at one point we’re treated to an excerpt of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem, the implication of which isn’t obvious but for the turmoil Romy’s going through at the time.

Reijn delivers a silkily sultry satirical look at office passion in “Babygirl,” but as far as viewers are concerned, superficiality, while pleasurable enough, prevails over depth.