Halina Reijn (2024)

Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is CEO of Tensile, a successful AI company in New York City.  She’s been married for nineteen years to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director; they have two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).  The first sound heard in writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl – a sound that precedes the first image on the screen – is Romy’s moans.  She and Jacob are having sex; once it’s done, Romy gets up from their bed and walks into a nearby room.  Lying on the floor there, she turns on a laptop then herself by watching a porn film:  we can see and hear that this is more exciting to her than the session with Jacob was.  In a company promo Romy announces that the increasing power of artificial intelligence in the workplace makes ‘emotional intelligence in leadership’ even more important.  It’s not long before she’s signally failing to deliver on that front:  she finds herself in a sexual relationship with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of the latest crop of Tensile interns.

Romy first sees him in the street outside the company offices.  Another man’s dog has got loose and, barking mad, heads straight for Romy.  Samuel calms the large black animal down quickly – it seems to Romy miraculously – and returns it to an apologetic owner.  Back in the marital bedroom, Romy tells Jacob she wants him to make love to her while she watches porn; he doesn’t seem keen so she tries something else (presumably) new, covering her head with a sheet while Jacob goes about his business.  He soon stops, telling Romy with an embarrassed laugh that what she’s doing makes him feel ‘like a villain’.  Jacob is currently directing a production of Hedda Gabler so it’s good news that Halina Reijn’s movie doesn’t conclude with her heroine committing suicide.  The story’s timeframe is only a few weeks – at any rate, there are Christmas trees in evidence almost throughout.  Romy’s affair with Samuel causes a crisis in her marriage but she and Jacob patch things up; Samuel, who (speedily) moves to a job somewhere in Japan, is gone but not forgotten.  The less good news about Babygirl is that it ends with Romy, in bed with Jacob, fantasising about Samuel and that black dog – a fantasy that yields her first-ever orgasm during sex with her husband.

The film is very well acted by all three principals.  And, though this is damning with faint praise, it’s a relatively nuanced exploration of gender power relationships in the workplace – relative, that is, to recent movies like the fictional The Assistant (2019) or the fact-based Bombshell (2019), which also featured Nicole Kidman.  Yet Babygirl is essentially rather silly.  The who’s-exploiting-who dynamic of Romy and Samuel’s relationship is superficially compelling but this is really the story of one woman’s particular sexual needs – which don’t connect interestingly to her exceptionally successful professional life.  Reijn doesn’t, besides, make it convincing that Romy expresses these needs at work – even though the opening verbal exchanges between her and Samuel there are convincing, and funny.  When the new interns are introduced, as a group, to Romy, Samuel stands out by asking a tricky question; at this point Romy’s assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), hurriedly draws the meeting to a close before recommending Tensile’s mentoring scheme to the newcomers.  Romy bumps into Samuel again in the office refreshments area and asks him to get her a coffee – which he does, though not without letting her know caffeine’s bad for you late in the working day.  When she asks how he pacified the dog in the street, Samuel says he gave it a cookie; when she then asks if he always has cookies about his person, he admits with a chuckle that he does, adding, ‘Why, d’you want one?’  Next time their paths cross, he tells Romy he’s chosen her as his mentor.

It’s at this point that Babygirl starts to wobble.  Romy tells Samuel she’s not part of the mentoring scheme; he refers to a list of names he’s received that shows otherwise.  Although Reijn doesn’t give much detail on the size of organisation that Tensile is, the idea of a CEO mentoring interns seems surprising – and it clearly comes as unwelcome news to Romy.  Yet she simply accepts what Samuel says, and she doesn’t query things with Esme, who presumably circulated the list of available mentors.  The rationale for Romy’s accepting Samuel as a mentee can’t be that she’s already so smitten that she just likes the idea of seeing as much of him as possible.  In the film’s later stages, apparently unassuming Esme will instruct her boss to promote her in exchange for silence about the affair with Samuel; but we can’t be meant to infer that Esme engineered the mentoring relationship on the off chance that Romy would fall into the trap of getting romantically involved with Samuel.  There’s no good reason, in other words, for Romy to agree to mentor – except that Reijn is dependent on this to get the affair underway.

At the first mentoring session, Samuel wastes no time.  He propositions Romy.  She protests briefly before kissing him.  The die is cast.  Whereas Samuel knows he now has the upper hand, Romy isn’t so quick on the uptake.  When they rendezvous in a hotel room, she frets that she may be exploiting Samuel because she’s a boss and he’s an intern and because of the large age difference between them; he matter-of-factly replies that he could get her fired ‘with one phone call’.  What’s more, when she vainly tries to assert her authority, he tells her she wants to be told what to do.  He can read her like a book.  In the trysts that follow, Samuel shows Romy some tenderness (telling her how beautiful she is, calling her ‘babygirl’ as he holds her) and there’s shared intimacy between them but he’s always in charge.  He orders Romy to get down on all fours and she obeys, without even getting a cookie.  On another occasion, she takes up the same position and drinks from the saucer of milk Samuel has placed on the floor (they seem to be getting dogs and cats mixed up at this point).  Next time, he asks if she wants to take her clothes off; when she says no, he says, ‘But you will, won’t you?’ and she does.

If the scenario involved a male CEO and a female intern, an intelligent film audience nowadays would see him as thoroughly reprehensible, however blatantly she gave him the come-on and whatever she then made him do.  Although the role of Samuel is probably underwritten, Harris Dickinson helps Reijn to exploit the relative ambiguity of the female boss-male underling set-up.  Dickinson is unassertively charming; he makes Samuel sensitive but not greatly vulnerable.  He sometimes does it tentatively but this young man is always trying to see what he can get away with.  But Reijn – presumably to underline that Romy’s position is less powerful than might be supposed – makes her too readily exploitable.  If she’s so sexually dissatisfied and hungry, how come she has kept going with Jacob for nearly two decades without mentioning something?  She clearly hasn’t told Jacob before if his puzzled then hurt reactions to what now happens are to be believed.  As interpreted by Nicole Kidman, Romy is not a woman asserting herself professionally as a means of compensating for mute submission in the domestic sphere.  Babygirl would be more plausible if she explored getting what’s missing in her marital sex life in ways that didn’t complicate her working life.

Tensile is a good name for a company headed by Nicole Kidman, whose Romy is hyper-sensitised to a degree:  you’re surprised Jacob and Samuel don’t get an electric shock touching her.  Kidman shows enormous technical skill – and is reasonably being praised for a ‘fearless’ performance – yet her role, for all that it’s a showcase for her talents,  feels demeaning, too.  The same goes, in a lesser way, for Antonio Banderas.  His emotionally truthful playing lends Jacob Mathis a credibility that the writing of the character doesn’t deserve:  Jacob’s culturally tony line of work enables Romy to appear at, then disappear from, a first-night backstage party; otherwise, Jacob might as well be a chartered accountant.  A subplot involving the love life of the Mathises’ lesbian elder daughter is no more than filler.

In Babygirl’s penultimate scene, a male executive at the company – a man older than Romy – parks himself in her office, asks if she arranged for Samuel to head for Japan and invites her to his own house the following week when ‘I’ll have the place to myself’.  Romy tells the creep she’s not afraid of him and to get out.  You want to cheer her bold response – though it’s not clear, given how many people appear to know what went on between her and Samuel, how she has suddenly become so fearless.  This sequence seems to be inserted to show that normal service in contemporary screen depictions of the workplace has been resumed:  men are sleazeballs, women offer feisty resistance.  By now, though, it’s hard not to think that Halina Reijn was less interested in exploring the complexities of Romy’s world than in crafting an ‘erotic’ thriller – an order of priorities that’s strikingly reflected, incidentally, in reviews of her film.  Plenty of critics are judging Babygirl‘s success primarily according to how steamy or un-steamy they found it to be.

12 January 2025