‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control

One of the many reasons that sex scenes in movies have faded as a phenomenon is the omnipresence of pornography. When people can just click on their deepest kinks and favored objects of desire, who needs the carefully staged R-rated “erotic” version?

As if to acknowledge this, “Babygirl,” a drama about a dangerous office liaison written and directed by Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”), opens with a high-angle close-up of Nicole Kidman straddling an unseen man and panting with pleasure. It looks and sounds a lot like the kind of movie sex scene that would have once been described as “hot.” But as soon as the coupling is over, and the man — Antonio Banderas, as Kidman’s husband — says “I love you,” we see Kidman escape to another room (easy to do in their gargantuan Manhattan apartment), at which point she breathlessly lies down on the floor in front of her laptop and masturbates to a grungy piece of incest porn.

The joke of this is that Kidman’s character, Romy, is presented as a woman who “has it all.” She’s the CEO of her own company — an e-commerce outfit called Tensile Automation, a kind of next-level Amazon that promises one-day delivery by using automated logistics (i.e., the entire warehouse is operated by robotics). She’s got her nice, caring, supportive husband, who’s a prominent New York theater director, as well as two vibrant teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly). And she’s got her healthy “normal” sex life …and her secret transgressive fantasies, which are what really get her off. In other words, she has it all; she just doesn’t have it all in one place.  

Early on, we see Romy in the office and in the mission-statement videos she makes for the company, where every upbeat word is market-tested, including a reference to how “nurturing” the company is — even though its all-robot premise basically results in putting people out of work. (The way Romy sees it, she’s liberating them from menial jobs.) The movie offers up a sly take on what’s happening in corporate culture today, though what gives that its kick is the way that it all connects to Romy’s pent-up sexuality, and to the forbidden office hookup that’s about to ensnare her.

Romy, with her “friendly” professional demeanor, her eyes glued to the information stream coming out of her phone, is the boss as highly functional control freak. What she’s craving, underneath it all, is the kind of sexuality that’s going to break that control apart. And the implication of “Babygirl” is that it isn’t just Romy. The movie presents us with a society, increasingly rooted in technology and the lockstep of corporate protocols, where everything is controlled. Which just feeds everyone’s desire to bust out of it.

The young man who’s going to ignite Romy’s fantasies is Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of the company’s new slate of interns. That’s right: This is a movie about a fiftysomething boss who falls into an affair with a work dude who’s barely out of college. If “Babygirl” had been made 20 years ago, the movie would probably have been conceived as a “cougar” fantasy. The first time Romy and Samuel saw each other, it would have been all about their animal magnetism. But Reijn does something shrewder than that.

The two characters meet when the interns are given a tour of Tensile’s sprawling lower Broadway office suite. They’re paraded into Romy’s office, at which point Samuel asks her an incredibly rude question about the company’s robot premise. Dickinson, the gifted actor from “The Iron Claw” and “Triangle of Sadness,” his baby face set off by a jagged haircut, is like a more blunt-edged Austin Butler. His Samuel is telling Romy, before they’ve barely glanced at each other, “I make the rules. By breaking yours.” And that’s what’s sexy. These are great-looking actors, yet in “Babygirl” their chemistry is all about — only about — the promise of transgression. Each time Samuel sees Romy at the office, he confronts her with another casually hostile negging remark. He shoots past all niceties and small talk. His “flirting” is an aggro assault. And that’s why she can’t resist it.   

“Babygirl” turns into a shrewdly honest and entertaining movie about a flagrantly “wrong” sadomasochistic affair. In “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” Reijn created a tone of overwrought satirical slasher pulp, but here she settles into a far more realistic mode, and brings it off with flair. The movie is reminiscent, at times, of “Fair Play,” but it’s also a tale of adultery that pushes genuine emotional buttons, the way “Unfaithful” did 20 years ago. And that’s rooted in the fearless performance of Kidman.

Straddling the identities of mother, boss, defiant adulterer, and trembling sexual supplicant, she’s like a walking mood ring. Her Romy takes off from a long-standing (hidden) reality: that people who are hooked on wielding power can have primal fantasies of being sexually submissive. For decades, prominent male executives have been keeping B&D sex workers in business, but in movies we haven’t seen the corporate gender tables turned in quite this way. For a while, “Babygirl” comes on like a less glossy “9½ Weeks,” as Samuel breaks down Romy’s defenses, notably in a scene where people from the office are having cocktails after work and he sends her over a drink … of milk. He’s saying, “You’re my baby girl.” And when she drinks it down, she’s saying, “Yes I am.”

When they meet in a hotel room, Kidman goes back and forth between submission and refusing to submit, and the play of emotions on her face is astonishing. She lets us see the erotic war that’s tearing Romy apart. But, of course, what’s dangerous about this affair isn’t just the S&M kink of it. It’s that Romy is trashing every corporate rule that now governs relationships in the workplace. And the shrewdest trick of the movie is the way Samuel uses those protocols, and the breaking down of them, to seduce Romy into crossing the line. The fact that she’s having an affair with an intern from her own company, risking everything that she’s built, is part of the turn-on. The spark plug of Kidman’s performance is that she plays this sick recklessness as something fully human: the expression of a woman too compartmentalized to put the different parts of herself together. She’s caught up in an erotic fever, but it’s one that’s laced with agony.

Does it all come tumbling down? “Babygirl” has a conventional design (and one very good eye-candy needle drop, in which the tattooed Samuel snake-dances to George Michael’s “Father Figure”). But one of the film’s strengths is that it avoids the sort of roller-coaster last act that we expect from an “erotic thriller.” There’s an old-school moralism at work in movies like “Fatal Attraction,” where the characters are punished for their sins. Reijn is after something different — she’s out to liberate characters who are too busy punishing themselves. “Babygirl” takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.