Babygirl

The Architecture of Surrender

There is a very specific silence that takes over a house when everyone else is asleep and you're left alone with the parts of yourself you've been managing all day. *Babygirl* opens right inside that silence. Romy, a high-powered CEO played by Nicole Kidman, gives her husband a perfectly executed fake orgasm: convincing, practiced, dead inside. Once he falls asleep, she slips into the glossy bathroom, opens her laptop, and finishes herself off to rough porn. The movie tells you what it's about immediately. This isn't about sexual discovery. It's about desire so tightly sealed off it has started rattling behind the walls.

Halina Reijn, after the bright panic of *Bodies Bodies Bodies*, turns here toward a more middle-aged kind of implosion. People keep calling *Babygirl* an "erotic thriller," but that label doesn't really fit. If you're expecting the shiny, punitive logic of 1990s studio thrillers, where transgression usually ends in blood or ruin, this film moves on stranger tracks. Reijn is after shame, and specifically the kind of shame that festers when a woman who commands everything in public realizes what she wants most is to stop commanding for a while.



The visual design pins Romy inside her own success. Her company, Tensile, is all cold blues, hard whites, glass partitions, and aggressive geometry. Everything feels air-conditioned into submission. (I kept thinking about the suffocating domestic polish of Todd Haynes' *Safe*, where the environment itself seems to reject human softness.) Then Samuel arrives, a twenty-something intern played by Harris Dickinson, and he doesn't so much disrupt this order as quietly unmake it. He's not some dark puppet master. He just notices things.

The hotel-room scene where they finally cross the line is the best example of how the film handles power. Romy comes in wrapped in expensive clothes and executive control, trying to structure her own submission like it's another item on an agenda. She approaches kink the way she probably approaches a board meeting. Samuel, slouched in a chair in this aggressively beige room, refuses the framing. He strips all the glamour out of it. He has her drink a full glass of milk, which is strange, humiliating, and absurdly effective because it forces her back into her body. Kidman's posture there is incredible. You can see the exact moment the polished executive starts to fall away and something more physical, less managed, takes over.



Kidman has spent years playing wealthy women with elegant defenses around internal fractures, but here she lets the shell crack more awkwardly. There's nothing sleek about Romy's desperation. It's frantic, a little ungainly, almost embarrassing in the best way. She isn't trying to look seductive for the camera; she's playing a woman who no longer knows how to inhabit touch naturally. Dickinson understands the assignment by doing less. His sleepy, unruffled Gen Z demeanor makes his control feel effortless. He doesn't need to perform authority loudly. Sheila O'Malley was right in her RogerEbert.com review when she said the film sometimes feels like "that of a comic-opera." It really does. The entire arrangement has a darkly funny absurdity to it, especially when you remember these people are trying to fit a psychosexual unraveling between meetings.

Antonio Banderas, as Romy's husband Jacob, is another smart choice. He carries decades of cinematic sensuality with him, and Reijn uses that expectation against the film. Jacob is loving, considerate, fundamentally decent. He just can't offer his wife the roughness and surrender she wants. The movie refuses the easy move of turning him into a villain to justify what comes next. Sometimes a marriage fails not because anyone is cruel, but because desire keeps getting mistranslated.



I'm still not fully settled on the ending. Reijn makes a few structural choices that feel messy, and now and then the script pushes Romy to verbalize things the camera had already made painfully clear. Whether that breaks the spell probably depends on how much explicit emotional explanation you can tolerate once the visual language has already done the work. But the movie's real impact isn't in the mechanics of its plot. It's in the horrible recognition that you can build an entire immaculate life around keeping your own nature locked out, only to discover you've left a door open the whole time.