The instant I heard about Babygirl, I smelled trouble right away.
For one thing, it’s an erotic thriller. Those are extremely high-risk/high-reward. A great many filmmakers have tried to emulate the success of Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne, and the vast majority have failed because they didn’t have courage or intelligence to go with the smut. Too many filmmakers (and studio execs, and film critics, and moviegoers…) make the mistake of treating shock value as an end in itself, without using the sex to subvert expectations or say anything new. It’s become especially common ever since “50 Shades” (something all but outright invoked in the marketing of Babygirl) and its many imitators came along to make tawdry brainless pablum into something lucrative.
But then came the third strike: The premise. Romy Mathis is a wealthy high-powered corporate executive, she looks like Nicole Kidman, she’s happily married to Antonio Banderas, and she’s engaging in an extramarital workplace affair with an intern half her age (Samuel, played by Harris Dickinson). I already hate this.
Then again, we must consider the pedigree of the filmmakers. A24 still has a brand name built on provocative highbrow cinema, even if they have come out with a few highly polished turds over the past few months. (Yes, I stand by my assessment of Longlegs.) And of course we can’t forget Nicole Kidman — late of the iconic Eyes Wide Shut and the criminally underappreciated To Die For — who certainly knows how to make an erotic thriller work.
And then we have Halina Reijn. It makes a huge difference to have an erotic thriller written, produced, and directed by a woman; that’s not something we see very often anymore. More importantly, Reijn previously directed Bodies Bodies Bodies, a film with deeply unsympathetic characters and a great many fascinating statements. Sure, I didn’t like the movie, but I get the appeal.
And once again, as with Bodies Bodies Bodies, we get a movie that shockingly failed for reasons I did not anticipate.
To be entirely clear, I think I get what the filmmakers were trying to go for. Romy is the CEO of a massively successful robotics company that she founded herself, her career occupies her constantly, and she’s with a husband who can’t make her orgasm. (Again, that’s Antonio fucking Banderas we’re talking about. Whatever, we’ll go with it.) Put it all together and we’ve got a woman who’s desperately in need of a human connection. More than that, she has this constant need and desire to be in control all the time, and maybe what she really needs is to let go and do something dangerous.
Yet paradoxically, even as the CEO of her own company, she’s still an upwardly mobile woman in a man’s world. The third act introduces the notion that Romy is still compelled to kiss the asses of her male investors and board members, and maybe she wanted to feel that humiliation in a different context that she had some degree of control over. On the other hand, precisely because Romy is one of the rare few empowered women to make her way up to the top of the ladder, she holds unwitting power as a role model for all the other empowered women in business. Which means that if she goes down for her moral failings, she could (however unfairly) take so many other talented and ambitious women down with her.
Last but not least, it’s worth noting that Romy is constantly on her phone, texting and e-mailing when she should be with her family. Yet she’s never on her phone when she’s with Samuel. I submit that maybe Romy has become so obsessed with her work that she’s incapable of feeling true pleasure unless she’s mixing work with pleasure.
On a macro level, I like and appreciate what the film is going for. On a micro level, none of it works. Why not? Well, there are a few reasons, but they all come down to one central cause: Harris… Goddamn… Dickinson.
The rest of the cast is wonderful. I like Sophie Wilde as Romy’s confidante and loyal assistant. I like Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly as Romy’s daughters. Antonio Banderas is massively overqualified for the husband role, and he brings the passion when it really matters. And of course Nicole Kidman is a powerhouse, perfectly suited to be playing this exact role in this exact movie. Kidman understands the assignment and she’s putting all her extraordinary talent into making it work.
The problem is that Dickinson is giving her nothing to work with. Yes, I get that this character is supposed to be an enigma by nature, but there’s stoic and then there’s flat. Dickinson’s performance offers no vulnerability, no sympathy, no clue as to what he wants or what he’s thinking or what he’s doing. We don’t even get any smolder or charisma or any kind of primal attraction. There is zero chemistry here.
The end result is that Kidman keeps acting Dickinson off the screen, trying to power the core relationship singlehandedly when her co-lead is giving her nothing to work with. Thus we’re left with a central relationship that does not make any kind of mental, emotional, physical, or practical sense. This further means that we’re left with characters contradicting themselves at every turn because nobody — not the characters themselves, not the audience, probably not even the filmmakers — has any clue what these characters want or need.
It’s an erotic thriller built around a relationship that doesn’t work on any level. Inevitably, the whole movie crumbles around it.
Of course, what really sucks is that it didn’t have to be this way. Literally the only thing this movie needed was a young male actor who could play vulnerable, play dangerously sexy, and go from one to the other on a dime. I know Timothee Chalamet is the cliche go-to for this kind of thing, but it didn’t have to be him either. Where was Austin Butler? Where was Jacob Elordi? They couldn’t have gotten Josh O’Connor or Mike Faist? Was Jeremy Allen White not available? Did anyone even try to call Lucas Hedges?!
Movies like Babygirl prove why it’s so hard to make a decent movie. It’s the product of so many compelling ideas, so many smart and novel choices, and yet it only took one choice to bring it all crashing down.
…Well, maybe that’s unfair. Even if Samuel had been played by a different actor, I don’t know if that actor would’ve been able to make any more sense of the character as written and directed. But what I do know for sure is that if a movie is built around a romantic/sexual relationship between two people and it’s only one of the two who’s doing all the work, there’s no coming back from that. The movie is fatally and irreparably broken.
Everyone involved deserves better than this. Banderas deserved better than this. Kidman deserved better than this. Hell, I’m sure even Dickinson deserves a role better than this with a director who properly knows how to use him. But most of all, I seriously believe that Halina Reijn can do better than this. She keeps making movies with such brilliant ideas that keep coming up frustratingly short. For all our sakes, Ms. Reijn, please try harder.