BABYGIRL

Today, the first working Monday of the new year, is the day upon which more people file for divorce than on any other.  Couples have spent their Christmases holding onto the cliff-face of failing marriages by their fingernails, and they finally make a resolution to themselves and to one another to throw in the carabiners (really trying not to mix metaphors…).  Perhaps they went into the holidays entertaining two possible, equally fantastical outcomes, (i) a blissful future together or (ii) an exciting future apart, but, having put as much effort as they can muster into playing happy families, they end the season with just one fantasy in contention, opting for the unknown adventure over that which is familiar: a future apart.

It was on the first working Monday of 2023 when my now ex-husband and I began couples therapy, but we watched it slip away from us and evolve irretrievably into separation counselling before the first hour was over.  How quickly we give up on those we love (and on ourselves), eh? Anywho, it is the first full working week of the year and, given I am already divorced, what better way to begin it than to watch BABYGIRL, Halina Reijn’s much anticipated erotic thriller?  I can think of none.

Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a top executive at a warehouse robotics firm, a leading intellectual light in AI, introduced mid-coitus with her handsome, attentive husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas).  Her loud, bestial sex noises indicate she’s rather enjoying herself, but her immediate post-coital escape to masturbate while watching porn suggests all that grunts is not necessarily grateful in the farmyard that is Romy’s sex life.  Her dissatisfaction is confirmed when her eye is caught by Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern at her firm, first seen miraculously calming a wild and dangerous dog on a city street, giving us all the elements we need for some brilliantly camp dialogue:

ROMY

How’d you get that dog to calm down?

SAMUEL

I gave it a cookie.

ROMY

Do you always have cookies on you?

SAMUEL

Yeah.  Why?  Do you want one?

Genius.  More of this please, filmmakers!  And, to be fair, we do get more of this from BABYGIRL, loads more, much of which is very funny and very, very quotable.  And if you’re in the early-Monday-morning mood for an erotic thriller with some great lines of camp dialogue, it can meet all of your needs and satisfy your base appetites, but… it is also oddly academic in its thesis, structure, on-the-nose references and rather ham-fisted, exposition-heavy conclusion.

The thesis of BABYGIRL is something along the lines of: As we lean further into AI, we can only maintain the delicate balance of our natural human dichotomy (huge intellectual capacity uncomfortably coupled with base appetites and instincts) if we lean to an equal extent into our animal natures.  Or, more succinctly: Beware the beast that lives in all (wo)men, even the seemingly happily married, successful ones working in AI.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about the idea of middle-aged women wanting sex, having kinks and watching porn - been there, done that (cinematically speaking and thinking particularly of Jane Campion’s adaptation of Susanna Moore’s IN THE CUT, now more than twenty years old, not personally speaking, if you don’t mind, you nosy fuckers…) - but I think the first 90 minutes of BABYGIRL does it pretty darn well.  We see Jacob’s resistance to acknowledging any of Romy’s kinks or sexual preferences, preferring to resume his place on top, dominating her physically, looking her in the eye with a proprietary energy as if to say, “Look what I’ve got here.  Look at what is mine.”  And her confession that she has not orgasmed once during sex with him in their 19 years of marriage is taken as any man would take such a claim: he plays the victim and makes it entirely about him, poor guy…. FFS.  In contrast, we see the cat and mouse game developing between Romy and Samuel as power ebbs and flows between them, and they catch one another’s scent and begin the mutual pursuit.

The animal references come in fast and furious, hot and heavy, extending far beyond the grunts of the opening scene and into orders, tricks, treats, lapping milk, licking one another etc etc etc.  Romy goes to the theatre where Jacob works, answering his query as to why she is there by saying, “I am watching you in your natural habitat.”  So, human beings are animals, right?  And they have animal instincts and appetites?  And these appetites might need/want to be trained?  WE GET IT, FFS!  You have evidenced your thesis well and remarkably comprehensively, thank you.

The problem is that even after all of the evidencing and bucketloads of animal references, we are still stuck with a good 25 minute concluding paragraph of the academic paper that is BABYGIRL, including all of the exposition you never wanted and do not need.  I think if I were called away after 90 mins, I’d feel extremely generously towards this film, but it has, unfortunately, given itself enough rope with which to hang itself, which it does in spectacular fashion, leaning heavily and dangerously into rape fantasy territory and other misogynistic mechanisms designed to exculpate predatory men.  There is even a moment when Samuel says to Romy, as she shakes nervously in front of him, “I don’t want to feel like this.  Why are you making me feel like this?”  I hear ya, Samuel.  Why are women always dressing so provocatively and having breasts and legs and stuff and generally just ‘asking for it’, eh?!  Why, indeed.

Both Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson deliver excellent, complex performances, her best for quite some time and a welcome distance from those we suffered through in EXPATS (no excuse whatsoever for that show…) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, THE PERFECT COUPLE (which was shit, but very watchable shit which I binged in a single sitting).  She remains a very stylish (in an Ulla Johnson wardrobe I covet… swoon!) and beautiful woman, albeit one who has clearly had all the nips, tucks, peels, injectables and whatever the hell else we’re doing to ourselves these days, a face more like a highly polished table than a human being, and she uses her unnatural “look” bravely and to her benefit in BABYGIRL, including a great line when she says, “I’m not normal.  Look at me.”  Has ever a truer thing been said by a movie star?  (And, btw, I wondered aloud in a previous review what she might have looked like if she had forgone the surgeon’s scalpels and aesthetician’s needles, and if you want to know the answer then pause BABYGIRL and look closely at her earlobes.  I’ll say no more other than to ask you to compare them with her breasts….  I mean, all four appendages have experienced the same lifetime of gravitational pull, yet two are swinging free and wrinkly, happy as hundred year old clams, and the other two are pert as a teenager’s.  Just sayin’!) And we knew he had something special when we saw TRUST and TRIANGLE OF SADNESS and THE IRON CLAW, but we get much more nuance and depth from Harris Dickinson in BABYGIRL, and a great but unbelievably ‘on the nose’ moment and one somewhat derivative of SALTBURN, is him dancing to George Michael’s Father Figure immediately after calling Romy his ‘baby girl’: “I will be your father figure, put your tiny hand in mine; I will be your preacher, teach ya anything you have in mind.”

So, BABYGIRL may well be classed as an “erotic thriller”, but I say it is also an academic thesis on evolving female sexuality (individually, societally, culturally and, of course, cinematically), and it is a successful one, undoubtedly, but one that hammers home its point unrelentingly in its final unproductive thrusts.  You should watch it, but, if you have the chance, I’d recommend you do your best to wriggle out from under the heavy pounding you’ll get from BABYGIRL in its concluding 25 minutes or so.  Go and pleasure yourself elsewhere if you possibly can. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️