If Catherine Breillat’s subversive stylings crossed ways with a classic screwball romance, it might look something like Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. This charged tale of a female CEO embarking on an affair with her younger male intern bears the most outward resemblance to the late 20th-century erotic thriller. Yet in spirit and subject, it’s a true comedy of remarriage.
As the great scholar Stanley Cavell observed in his study of early sound comedies that depicted adultery and tried to run afoul of the Hays Code by pledging allegiance to monogamous commitment, “The joining of the sexual and the social is called marriage.” Babygirl’s bookending scenes of Nicole Kidman’s Romy achieving orgasm within the confines of her relationship with Antonio Banderas’s Jacob tell the full story of a couple that learns to come together again after an affair. Similar to the resolution of many of those early comedies, the restoration of balance to Romy and Jacob’s relationship isn’t the ultimate purpose here because Reijn isn’t working within a genre framework to uphold institutional values.
The censorship to which Reijn responds isn’t the one imposed upon such films, but rather the one the characters internalize. Babygirl fixates on the transgression that becomes appealing when marriage is seen only as a social concession. The extramarital dalliance of Kidman’s Romy, the head of a robotics company, with Harris Dickinson’s fresh-faced but uncommonly assertive Samuel holds up an X-ray to society. Through their affair, Reijn illuminates how attitudes around gender, sexuality, age, class, and capitalism form the body politic.
At the outset of the film, the pleasure gap separating Romy and Jacob has grown so wide that she turns to post-coital porn viewing to bring herself to climax. Decades of piled-up tinder from unsatisfying sex leaves her uniquely vulnerable to combust upon the slightest spark of desire.
That’s what Samuel provides when, before Romy realizes that the young man is in her employ, he protects her from a dog attack by luring the animal away with a cookie. For someone whose job entails talking in a lot of sanitized PR speak, he further beguiles Romy, the archetype of the She-E.O., with the refreshing candor that he brings to their first professional interaction.
In another universe, Romy’s willingness to engage with Samuel’s nakedly flirtatious advances might have sent her down a path like the one taken by the eponymous character of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler, which Jacob, a Broadway theater director, happens to be putting on as Romy and Samuel’s tryst takes place. While Ibsen reflected a reality where there was little escape but suicide for women who dared to challenge norms, Reijn strives to reimagine a world where her protagonist can be normal even as she gives in to desires that some might deem abnormal. It’s only fitting, then, that the dynamic through which Romy begins to regain control of her sensual drive is one where she submits to a dominant Samuel.
The bedrock principle undergirding Reijn’s exploration of their carnal connection is always honesty. Babygirl makes for a stark contrast with Reijn’s prior film, 2022’s horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, whose young characters talk past each other in buzzwords and catchphrases to establish where they fall on various political continuums.
In stark contrast, Romy and Samuel’s torrid tête-à-têtes reveal how morality isn’t given to people but rather established between them. The impulsive instincts of their bodies don’t always convert neatly into the cold rationality of language, and the film pointedly refuses to prioritize one form of expression over the other. It’s messy, but it’s human—unlike the machines that Romy peddles that try to make everything easier through automation.
Babygirl highlights the awkwardness of trying to perform this translation in the heat of the moment. It provides space for Romy and Samuel to establish boundaries by listening to whatever form an urge takes and expressing consent accordingly. This level of reactivity requires full commitment from Kidman and Dickinson to be present, so they can make discoveries as their characters do. Their openness gives the film a genuine and uncommon charge that ripples throughout the film, amplified most notably through Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s electrifying score. The thrill of watching Romy and Samuel comes from watching them make, not break, the rules.
This isn’t to imply that Reijn is blind to the imbalance of power in the relationship or advocating for libertinism. She perceptively recognizes two classes of boundaries in society: those that protect people and those that police them. Babygirl doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater as it makes the case for ditching arbitrary barriers while reinforcing necessary ones.
Impressively, Reijn draws a clear line between public strictures and private behaviors. Especially for high-powered women like Romy, these pressures manifest in a form of intimate violence to remove inconvenient parts of one’s self. But as she gets further into her affair with Samuel, she realizes that their bodily harmony only grows stronger if she brings more of herself emotionally. Kidman’s deeply embodied performance startlingly homes in on Romy’s maternal and professional energy in her rendezvous with Samuel, showing that how she treats him like a son or employee doesn’t negate his position as her lover. Babygirl’s most urgent challenge to its audience is to synthesize, not compartmentalize, roles in life that might seem contradictory.
Some of this thematic thrust gets lost in the film’s third act, which incorporates elements of corporate satire as Romy’s assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde) begins to see the full picture of her boss’s activities. This mode pushes Babygirl into a more declarative state, but the meaning inside the messaging remains occluded enough to maintain Reijn’s rebellious, radical, yet respectful take on relationships. It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.
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