Babygirl: Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson sizzle in a sly and playful erotic drama

Sex is literally the beginning and end of Halina Reijn’s sly, slinky Babygirl, which opens and closes with Nicole Kidman’s Type-A tech CEO Romy having intercourse. In the first instance, she pretends to orgasm, and in the last she genuinely does, and so the film – partly a risk-addiction thriller but mostly a winking comedy of manners – could be reductively described as her journey from faking it to making it. That these scenes convey a great deal of necessary story information without themselves being particularly erotic, in a movie in which the drinking of a glass of milk or the offer of a cookie is imbued with borderline cataclysmic horniness, is the soul of its wit. Reijn and a superb Kidman (always so good at playing women whose rational selves are playing catchup with their instinctive behaviours) get off on proving that while sex can be sexy, sexy is always sexier.

Perhaps that observation will be enough to mollify – or indeed to dominate into panting submission – the vocal vanguard of the oddly puritanical discourse that has emerged recently around onscreen sex. But no matter, really; if some viewers still get their knickers in a twist about the movie’s more graphic interludes, you sense that nothing would please Reijn more. What’s another twisted knicker to Babygirl’s full drawer of dishevelled undergarments?

Speaking of sexy, let’s pause to savour Harris Dickinson, who brings such a gratuitously hot mixture of alphamale insolence and vulnerability to Samuel, the age-inappropriate intern with whom Romy strikes up a BDSM-spritzed affair, that you can practically feel the paint blistering on the walls whenever they’re together. It’s a wonder he can hold down his night gig as a barman, given that proximity to unmelted ice is presumably a job requirement. Samuel is the ultimate middle-aged careerwoman’s fantasy, transgressing exactly as much as Romy wants and no more. It’s remarkable that a film focusing on the dodgy politics of dominance and submission can be so unequivocally right-on in terms of consent, and so tuned to the female gaze that even when Samuel is nominally in control, it’s the way Romy looks at him that makes their contrived scenarios such a turn-on. It takes an exceptional actor to make such a unicorn feel plausible enough to lust after, but the hesitations and awkwardnesses that Dickinson laces into Samuel’s already peculiar, angular personality – his quick retractions, his embarrassed little laughs – all combine to make him not just distantly desirable, but tangibly so. He may be a fantasy creation – but Dickinson makes Samuel real enough to be lovable, even if love is never on the table here.

Romy’s love, and its attendant deceptions, are reserved for her daughters and theatre-director husband Jacob, who sleeps blissfully unaware of her simulated climax – why would he suspect she’s faking, he’s Antonio Banderas? – while she slips into another room to finish the job watching the kind of porn in which young women have rough sex with men they call ‘Daddy’. In a provocative juxtaposition, a morning-time scene of picture-perfect domesticity follows, as in the plush family kitchen Romy packs lovingly handwritten notes into her kids’ school lunchboxes.

Romy is the founder and head of a next-generation robotics firm which supplies delivery equipment for an Amazon-resembling retailer. She is an immaculately dressed fiftysomething woman who is wildly successful in a male- dominated field, who has also raised two children and remains in a stable marriage: the idea that such a person might have time/energy for a regular marital sex life to be dissatisfied with makes Romy as much of a wishfulfilment ideal as Samuel.

Perhaps that’s why their electric first encounter, outside Romy’s company’s building, is so odd and so charged. Samuel, absurdly boyish in a parka, carrying a backpack, locks eyes with her as he brings a ferociously barking dog to heel. Romy is, to use a word her generation never would, shook, a feeling that registers initially in a kind of rashlike irritation with Samuel, this nobody whose gaze somehow keeps snagging on hers. But friction only causes more heat; theirs will not be a love story, but Babygirl is intensely romantic in the observation of the kind of instantaneous, inexplicable attraction that magnetises all the molecules in your being to the presence of the other person, so that even in a crowded room it ’s impossible to be unaware of exactly where they are.

These geometries of desire are complicated by the power imbalance between high-flying CEO Romy and lowly intern Samuel, even if his behaviour towards her from the off is anything but lowly. He asks impudent questions, presumes on her time and insists on declaring her his mentor. Their push-pull seduction game is soon underway: a dirty little secret that Romy, whether interacting with her daughters, cosying up to her husband or getting a quick Botox jab (a nicely meta up-yours to Kidman’s cosmetic surgery critics) can cherish all to herself. But the deliciously illicit situation becomes more volatile when Samuel begins dating Romy’s ambitious executive assistant Esme (Sophie Wilde). Esme, admiring of Romy but also nobody’s fool, has had her polite petitions for a promotion tabled by her distracted boss once too often. Suddenly, amid all Romy’s titillating private role play and clandestinely coded public exchanges, actual career-and-family-threatening disaster looms.

There’s a fine line between destigmatising a powerful woman’s fantasies of sexual subservience, and robbing them of the forbidden thrill that makes them alluring in the first place. But Reijn, the director of the cleverly twisted Instinct (2019) and the blunt-but-fun Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), has such a handle on her film’s slippery tone that she can have her sex-cookie and eat it too, and for once the outcome is not so dire for the woman who dares to act on her most unwholesome desires. At just the point you fear you (and Romy) have had all the fun you can be allowed Reijn takes delight in swerving away from the obvious moralistic outcome. Dom-sub, age-gap, workplace relationships are transgressive in their titillations several times over. But the idea that a successful, driven, married mother in her fifties might get to dabble in such sexy problematics and not then be roundly punished for it? That’s the hottest and most subversive kink of all.

► Babygirl is available in UK cinemas from 10 January 2025.