Kidman is utterly fearless in unabashedly sexy 'Babygirl'

Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn has made a BDSM film rife with fumbling uncertainty, and comedy-drama 'A Real Pain' manages to stay honest,

- Clarisse Loughrey

In the cinema of kink – Secretary (2002), The Duke of Burgundy (2014) or, at its nadir, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) – there’s often a pattern of the learned and unlearned, the assured and unassured, and not always in a way that correlates directly to the dynamic of dominant and submissive. It’s often sexuality as the experience of the naif, taken by the hand and led into a private world, the halls of pleasure already constructed and defined by another.

Baby rl is different. Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn, also behind 2022’s amusingly nihilistic slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, has made a BDSM film rife with fumbling uncertainty. Yet it’s no less sexy, unabashedly and giddily so, thanks in great part to its committed leads, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Tech CEO Romy (Kidman) is deeply in love with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), but sexually unfulfilled. She’ll fake her orgasm, sneak off into a dark room, and masturbate to BDSM porn. She knows what she wants, but won’t accept it. She’s a submissive in denial. But Samuel (Dickinson), the new intern she embarks on an affair with, isn’t exactly a connoisseur in the art, either. He’s got a strong opening play – he sends her a glass of milk at the bar, covertly watches her down it in one gulp, and then whispers “good girl” on the way out – but starts to falter in the bedroom. “Maybe take your clothes off?” he suggests. They’ve both eagerly consented to the arrangement, but the question is: what happens next?

"Kidman’s always possessed an inexhaustible ability to surprise us, fuelled by a hunger for the whole breadth of cinema and human experience"