Nicole Kidman’s character in “Babygirl” has it all. Almost literally.
She’s the CEO of a powerhouse tech company, has two adoring teens and her dutiful spouse looks suspiciously like Antonio Banderas.
Her descent into lust, the kind we rarely see in modern movies, is the heart of this erotic drama. It’s a shame that the story caps in a cowardly way that feels all too predictable given 21st-century mores.
Kidman’s Romy Mathis oversees a company embracing the edge of our high-tech world. In between digital innovations, she carves out time to meet interns eager to jump-start their careers.
That includes Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a lanky gent who seems unimpressed by the company’s stature … or its leader. He makes a beeline for Romy, forcing a mentorship program with her despite her brutal schedule.
She can’t seem to shake his professional advances despite the power imbalance. He has other intentions beyond career advancement, and Romy has few defenses against them.
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.
We’ll spare the details, but he coaxes her into a sado-masochistic relationship that threatens everything she holds dear. That includes her doting husband Jacob (Banderas), clueless that Romy isn’t satisfied with their lovemaking.
That’s putting it mildly.
View this post on Instagram
“Babygirl” offers handsomely choreographed sex scenes that leave little to the imagination. Writer/director Halina Reijn (the criminally overrated “Bodies Bodies Bodies”) has little time for psychological nuance. This is about power, from a CEO who lords over her minions to the lover who brings said CEO to her knees…. And then forces her to lap up milk from a saucer.
That’s one of the few bits that can be revealed.
Romy hungers for something dangerous and exotic. She finds just that in her randy intern, ignoring how the affair could destroy decades of hard work, love and loyalty.
That’s certainly enough to sustain our interest. It also suggests fireworks will deploy in the third act, in some shape or form.
The resolution, alas, isn’t just devoid of detail or emotional resonance. It’s regrettably woke, even though other previous subplots are anything but. One of Romy’s underlings proves duplicitous in ways that skewer feminist groupthink.
It’s unexpected and refreshing. Real life is rarely woke, which is why the cultural scourge stained movie-making over the past decade.
‘Babygirl’ director says the film is her answer to Nicole Kidman’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ role https://t.co/n9jtmJCtCM
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) December 23, 2024
“Babygirl” features another sublime turn from Kidman, although the screenplay’s lack of nuance undercuts her performance. The narrative hints at her troubled past but it’s just lip service. Other psychological elements are equally thin.
This kind of story doesn’t just need a solid ending, an exclamation point to the narrative foreplay, it demands it. Reijn’s third act doesn’t come close. Affairs leave permanent scars. Marriages are never the same, even those that recover in some fashion.
“Babygirl’s” resolution proves glib, malnourished and deeply manipulative. Kidman’s bravura turn, and a romance that will tantalize more than a few viewers, deserve better.
HiT or Miss: “Babygirl” offers steamy interludes and another superlative turn from Nicole Kidman, but the resolution short-changes the film’s best efforts.
I want to sincerely thank Christian Toto and reviewers like him. I have (I’m serious) adopted a new practice where I wait for someone to give me a “woke alert” before I waste my time and money on a movie . No more embedded agenda in movies that look interesting on the poster. Guys like Toto now play a critical role for those of us who are fed up with with woke garbage.
Thanks, Christian. I owe you a beer for all the money you’ve saved me.
Appreciate the kind words! I bet we’ll see less and less of this kind of clunky storytelling in the near future …
That this movie exists is a condemnation of the society that produced and consumes it. What next? An “erotic thriller” about coprophilia, including “tasteful” depictions of people consuming human feces? Followed by Christian reviewers praising its actors for their “superlative turns” at gorging on turds.
An erotic thriller(?) starring a woman who is fundamentally unsexy doesn’t make sense.
And SOMEHOW the FAKE CHRISTIAN who runs this site who spends days WHINING about “MOVIES OF FAITH” tells us about a MARRIED WOMAN descending into DEBAUCHERY , without ever mentioning the word ADULTERY. You fake immoral Christians are going to be so surprised when you take your last breaths and then find that your whole “faith” was FAKE. You never lived by OR thought along the principles of Jesus Christ . In reality the only “principles”of Christ you lot are even aware of could fit on a bumper sticker.
Try this as you look at the STUPID CHRISTMAS TREE you fake morons brought home .
Jeer 10:2-5
2 Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.
5 They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.
I would like to THANK you so much for gracing us with your INFINITE wisdom and virtue.
Ordinarily I would say that someone who posts something as SELF RIGHTEOUS and ARROGANT as this is a jerk who doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response, but in your case I will make an exception because the POINT you’re making is so profound.
Truly, we all all lucky to be walking the face of the Earth at the same time as you, and I would like to profusely apologize on all our behalf for not being on your intellectual and THEOLOGICAL level. Please, I beseech thee, pray for us.
Sounds like shit to me.