Picture two riverbanks, facing each other accusingly. On one shore are sensual-yet-brutal erotic dramas like “Shame” (2011); across the water are blockbuster fantasies that prize titillation over illumination, like “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015).
Now, look closer. Between the banks is a river of films that seduce us without sacrificing their characters’ humanity—films like “Secretary” (2002), Steven Shainberg’s contemporary fairy tale about Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a troubled typist reborn through kinky romance.
“We can’t do this 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” declares Lee’s mysterious paramour, the original Mr. Grey (James Spader). “Why not?” Lee demands.
The latest answer to that question is Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” a slinky saga of a masochistic CEO and a domineering intern. At once risqué and humane, Reijn’s film rejects not only the bondage of sexual repression, but the false choice between wholesomeness and transgression that too many American movies buy into.
“I was born like this,” Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) tells her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). To accept her kinks is to accept her existence. To deny them is to deny it.
Romy runs Tensile, a New York-based artificial intelligence company that specializes in automated warehouses—which is a polite way of saying that it exists to steal jobs from living, breathing, thirsting humans. No wonder its CEO rarely gets off.
“Babygirl” begins with Romy having intercourse with Jacob. You couldn’t call it sex, because the moment it ends, Romy rushes down the hall, opens her laptop, and devours something more satisfying (to her): BDSM pornography.
For the record, Romy tries to broker a truce between Jacob’s passions and her kinks. She’s invited him to have sex with her while she watches porn; she’s implored him to make love to her while she has a pillow over her face.
“It makes me feel like a villain!” Jacob cheerfully protests to Romy. Emphasis on “me.” Jacob, a dashing theater director, is a theoretically enlightened man, but his enlightenment has calcified into unawareness. It doesn’t cross his mind that Romy occasionally wants him to play the villain.
A more willing ruffian arrives in Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who is a new intern at Tensile. Or is he? Samuel enters the story abruptly and eerily, soothing a rampaging canine with a cookie. Maybe he’s a mortal man. Or maybe he’s a manifestation of Romy’s dread and desire.
“What star sign are you?” Romy flirtatiously asks. “I don’t believe in that shit!” Samuel snaps. If anything, his feigned disdain and disinterest are even more attractive to Romy than his sculpted abs.

It’s easy to imagine Romy and Samuel as the stars of a Ronan Farrow exposé. But what would the headline be? “Predatory Male Pursues Female Supervisor”? Or “50-ish CEO Preys on 20-Something Subordinate”?
“I genuinely believed women with power would behave differently,” says Esme (Sophie Wilde), Romy’s assistant. It’s a great line, but it’s beside the point, since “Babygirl” exists in a mytho-erotic safe space where the characters (and the audience) can explore natural yearnings that are stigmatized as gross and wrong.
Many of those yearnings are fulfilled and given away in the film’s trailer—e.g. Samuel calling Romy a “good girl”—but happily, the marketing team held back all the best bits, including the post-sex, role-reversing moment when Samuel gently asks Romy, “Can you hold me?”
Nothing is fixed in “Babygirl”—not power, not gender. In one scene, Romy might smoke a cigarette on the balcony of a skyscraper, savoring her master-of-the-universe might; in another, she might stride into a dance club, feeling thrillingly vulnerable amid the pulsating strobe lights.
Not to be outdone by his magisterial co-star, Dickinson matches Kidman’s fluidity, playing a sometimes manly, sometimes boyish Bacchus who becomes a swaggering encyclopedia of sex-positivity—an R-rated angel, given that “Babygirl” is set during Christmas.
“Female masochism is a male construct!” Jacob howls in disbelief. “That’s a dated idea,” Samuel replies. Clarence would have said the same thing in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) if he’d been sent to salvage George Bailey’s sex life instead of his soul.
In 2017, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis scoffed at the idea that non-vanilla sex still demanded destigmatization, writing that Madonna and Helmut Newton “primed that pump long ago, turning dominance, submission and toys into an acceptable spectacle.”
While Dargis was probably right, she may have underestimated the depths of American puritanism. “Babygirl” is revelatory not because it’s scandalous, but because it takes place in the land of the not-free—the capital of constantly laughing about sex, and rarely talking about it honestly.
“Sexuality is often portrayed in stories, movies, and paintings as something that is so not the reality,” Reijn, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, told The New Yorker. “It looks either very glamorous or very dark—but for me it’s insanely vulnerable, very embarrassing, and sort of stop-and-go.”
“Babygirl” can be glamorous and dark—it wouldn’t be much fun if it weren’t—but it isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, to be embarrassed, to stop. Even a racy encounter in a crimson-draped hotel room ends with a comforting grace note: Romy snugly wrapped in Samuel’s hoodie.
“You’re very young,” Romy tells Samuel. “I don’t want to hurt you.” Before she can, Samuel vanishes as suddenly as he materialized, showing us that he was never a mere character. He was a reminder that while we weren’t all born like this, we were all born.