'Babygirl' Review: Nicole Kidman Comes to a Place of Magic in Halina Reijn's Smart Erotic Dramedy

Babygirl is What We Need in a Vanilla Cinematic Landscape

In recent years, there has been a lack of sexuality in film. I’m not talking about romantic sex, but straight-up fucking. Frankly, movies have been a bit conservative. With film snobs or Gen-Z viewers on Twitter going, “Why do movies need sex scenes?” and the industry adhering to that, cinema has been feeling so radically vanilla. Sex is so much more than shock value in movies. Sex is meant to emphasize connection and pleasure, and why it’s so important to human stimulation, but nobody wants to have that conversation. Babygirl is a perfect personification of that and feels so radical and fresh to witness a movie that allows its lead to experience this pleasure, affair be damned, and not villainize her for it. Also, it’s a ton of fucking fun, dude!

Kidman and Co. Dominate the Screen

Nicole fucking Kidman, man. She’s one of the hardest-working actresses in the industry today, and her performance is something that you’d never even expect from an actress of her caliber. It’s not even the raw sexual fervor because we’ve seen it with Eyes Wide Shut. However, portraying a character with such a high level of class and authority, and swiftly exhibiting a submissive sexual position, such as getting on all fours and licking milk off a bowl or standing in the corner like a school child being punished, without portraying it as humiliation, is a delicate balance that, frankly, no other actress can achieve. The Aussie icon you see in every AMC ad (except for this one, for some reason!) stars in about five or six projects a year and keeps proving her talent. There’s a reason why she’s being touted for Best Actress during the current award season; this is her one-woman show.

The film’s excellent supporting cast also bolsters Kidman’s performance. Harris Dickinson truly understands the assignment as Samuel, the equivalent of a manic pixie fuckboi who can read people easily, but one you can’t seem to figure out yourself. He has this type of seductive magnetism that allows Romy to figure out her freak shit without ever teetering their dynamic toward romance because that’s truly not what this movie is.