The composer David Raksin once described his film music as melodically tricky enough that ideally, he joked, the listener should skip the first hearing and try the second.
The same applies, for me at least, to “Babygirl.” The first time I saw “Babygirl” I couldn’t really get the hang or the pitch of it. Richly complex in terms of tone, it eluded easy categorization or response, and a lot of it felt uneasy in both right and wrong ways. Yet the richer elements of Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn’s film took hold and went further – all the way there, wherever “there” was for the actors, Nicole Kidman especially.
A second viewing revealed more, like most second encounters. Its examination, with weirdly comic swerves, of one woman’s risky road to sensual fulfillment lands on some good, old-fashioned values, capping a relationship between a formidable robotics firm CEO, played by Kidman, and her seductive, strategic intern, played by Harris Dickinson. In the broad terms of the BDSM realm, the boss is the submissive to the intern’s dominator. Now, this may be familiar territory for you, or it may not be. “Babygirl” doesn’t care. It’s nonjudgmental in ways some audiences won’t like. But as a table-turning riff on sexual thrillers with a male gaze, and as a portrait of one woman’s sensual fulfillment, it’s pretty compelling.
She and he meet outside the company’s Manhattan office. There’s a small crowd staring in awe at the intern, Samuel, as he calmly brings a snarling dog to heel with a few simple commands and a “good girl” on his lips. Romy, the executive, takes note of what’s happening. They exchange not glances, really, but stares bordering on glares bordering on lust. (The narrative moves right along in these early scenes.)
We’ve already gotten a defining element of Romy’s emotional and psychosexual makeup in the opening, set hours earlier, with Romy and her theater-director husband, played by Antonio Banderas, in the throes in bed. It’s a lie: She has faked orgasms across the whole of their marriage. She has desires she has never talked about with her husband. Seconds after this scene, Romy makes a hasty retreat with her laptop to another room, where she masturbates to some submissive-centric porn. Reijn establishes the stakes and Romy’s secrets with darting speed and efficiency.
The Banderas character is deep into rehearsals for a modern staging of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” a play about a thwarted sensual creature much like the woman he’s married to but doesn’t really know. Samuel requests Romy to be his mentor as part of his internship program; she doesn’t know what she’s been roped into until he’s there, in her office doorway. His come-ons lack all pretense and while she’s taken aback, and spouts the usual boilerplate HR commentary about what’s appropriate behavior and what isn’t, she doesn’t have her heart in it. Soon, it’s shared cigarettes on patios and makeout bouts followed by scenes where Romy visits the bar where Samuel bartends. He orders her a glass of milk as a dare; she downs it. The roleplay demands escalate. Soon she’s on all fours in a hotel room with him, obeying commands like the dog in the overture. Kidman has taken leaps before and has done plenty of nude scenes in recent years. But in “Babygirl,” the queasiness of the scenario is played both straight and for eccentric black comedy, which wouldn’t work at all if Reijn’s psychological territory — the shame and desire and insecurity — didn’t guide the way.
Romy and Samuel are damaged souls, yearning for a connection both darkly thrilling and, from a corporate policy point of view, untenable. Reijn’s screenplay doesn’t over-detail the source of either character’s damage, though we hear of Romy’s childhood, her upbringing in the confines of a cult. Samuel’s admiration and fear of his distant, strict, presumably violent father has left his own wiring a little haywire.
This is Reijn’s third feature, following “Instinct” (2019) and her first film in English, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022). “Babygirl” is not an erotic thriller per se, although the movie takes plenty of inspiration from Hollywood’s sexual transgression hits of the ‘80s and ‘90s (“Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct,” “Indecent Proposal”). Reijn has said in interviews that she rewatched “9½ Weeks” a lot as a teenager, a lot a lot. Her adult self has plenty of issues with that movie. The subject of a woman’s sensual curiosity and a controlling male looking for female submission is not one of them.
Dickinson’s Samuel is an intriguing, insolent magnet from the start. He’s also opaque and essentially unknowable in many ways. “Babygirl” has a peculiar rhythm and in the third and final section, after the affair has sent Romy into a full-on panic, things feel more hypnotized than hypnotic. Yet Kidman’s emotional abandon keeps costars Dickinson and Banderas on their toes. You’ll find the ending pat, but it’s a sincere affirmation of some good old-fashioned relationship virtues, honest communication most of all.
Also, the “Hedda Gabler” angle with “Babygirl” is hardly accidental. Ibsen’s notorious sexual vagabond suffocates in her marriage to the dullest academic on the planet, and she cannot square her desires with her lust for appearances. The character made no sense to most critics back in the late 1800s. Novelist Henry James reviewed the play, adored it, yet professed his confusion that he couldn’t locate “the type-quality in Hedda.” In other words, the character was a tangle of impulses, qualities, drives.
At its best, the flawed, worthwhile “Babygirl” offers a similarly dimensional example of a woman, searching for a truer self, and fewer false fronts to maintain. Kidman rises to the occasion, and while one-note mediocrities like “The Substance” offer gallons of fake blood where the provocations should be, Reijn’s film — seen the second time, at least – only needs its nerve and its interest in what Kidman can do, which is more than I even realized.
“Babygirl” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, nudity and language)
Running time: 1:54
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Dec. 25
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
