All up, this is a much more ambitious, boldly dissonant movie than I anticipated from Reijn, a Dutch director whose previous US film, the teen horror-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, was amusing but weightless (unlike Babygirl, it wasn’t from her own script).
It’s true that the shape of the story is more conventional than many of the individual scenes, and that the stylistic flourishes can feel arbitrary: I’m not sure what’s gained from the direct visual allusions to Kidman’s career-defining role in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, including the many glowing Christmas trees.
Antonio Banderas plays Nicole Kidman’s nice but dull husband. Credit: Niko Tavernise
Perhaps it’s a way of saying that, as in Kubrick’s film, it’s necessary for viewers to set their expectations aside. Babygirl has been billed as an erotic thriller: the erotic part is accurate, but it’s hardly a thriller, although several characters act as if they imagine they’re in a thriller for the space of a scene or two.
Threats are made and ultimatums delivered, but little that anybody says sticks, to the point where this becomes an implicit running joke: even when it seems crystal clear Romy and Samuel have to stop seeing each other, he shows up a couple of scenes later as if nothing had occurred.
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The movie also isn’t entirely a satire. Still, there are satirical implications built into its vision of sex and business as parallel realms where a range of transactions can take place and where power relations aren’t simply imaginary, but only become fully real to the degree people choose to invest in them.
Not all viewers will be equally ready to invest in the fantasy of Babygirl, but the awkward space between safe distance and all-out commitment is where the movie invites us to spend some time.
Babygirl is in cinemas from today.
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