Alsatian roleplay, perma-Christmas, thumbsucking, George Michael’s Father Figure and Robyn’s Dancing on my Own: Babygirl, in which Nicole Kidman gives a characteristically daring, wickedly funny turn as a high-flying chief executive embroiled in a sexual power struggle with an underling, is a wild ride.
Kidman plays Romy, the striving head of a tech company that, chillingly, resembles Amazon with robots. Romy does it all. At home she makes lunches for her daughters. At her country retreat she wears fabulous knitwear while fishing a dead skunk from the swimming pool. Her dashing, supportive theatre-director husband is played by Antonio Banderas, for goodness’ sake.
But something is amiss. Following loud sex with her doting spouse, she sneaks off to masturbate to grubby porn. Samuel, a new office intern played by the Triangle of Sadness and Iron Claw star Harris Dickinson, seems to have a supernatural sense for reading Romy’s erotic needs. The pair embark on a strange, kinky battle of wills.
At the film’s world premiere, at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Kidman said that Babygirl’s sex scenes often left her “ragged” – “There were times when we were shooting where I was, like, ‘I don’t want to orgasm any more’ … I’ve made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this,” she said.
For Halina Reijn, its Dutch writer and director, Babygirl shares some DNA with films such as 9½ Weeks, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Disclosure and Indecent Proposal. “Everything I saw in Hollywood movies made me think, That’s not how I orgasm – there must be something wrong with me,” she says. “But those erotic thrillers were darker. They had forms of sexuality that were a little more extreme and they had interesting power dynamics...
“Those films made me feel less alone, but I always hated the endings, when women got punished. I’m constantly playing with these stories. We have Harris dancing for Nicole, a direct mirror of Kim Basinger dancing in 9½ Weeks. Our club scene is a tribute to Basic Instinct. So we’re playing with the audience where they kind of expect someone to die or become evil. Except nobody here is a villain. That’s how I approach it. I do love Paul, though,” she says, referring to her compatriot Paul Verhoeven, the director of Basic Instinct.
Kidman tapped Reijn after seeing Instinct, her Dutch-language directorial debut, in which Carice van Houten, the film-maker’s longtime friend and collaborator, plays a prison psychologist who becomes infatuated with a rapist she is evaluating.
“Nicole is such an incredible feminist,” Reijn says. “She looks at every single small movie made by a woman from every corner of the world ... We started to work on some things that came from her company. I was convinced I wanted to write something by myself – when I write I play all the roles myself, in my apartment. She asked what it was about, then read a very early draft and said, ‘I want to do this.’ I couldn’t believe it...
[ Nicole Kidman on sex, death and her risky new film, BabygirlOpens in new window ]
“Nicole was very attracted to the character because she felt she had so many layers,” Reijn says. “But mainly she was attracted by the theme of liberation. The kink is not a specific thing. It’s more about the message that I’m trying to tell myself about the world: it’s okay to have fantasies and maybe explore some of them. You are not alone in your darkness. Don’t judge yourself too much, be playful and whether you want to dress up like a clown or a giraffe, or whatever you want to do, it’s okay.
“Try to communicate with your partner about it, so that he or she knows more about what you like and want. Because, for a lot of women, we don’t even know what we want. Our own bodies are a mystery to us. A lot of us hate our own bodies. It doesn’t matter what you look like. I know some of the biggest models in the world who hate their own bodies.”
Gen Z seem to be far more interested in seeing platonic relationships on screen than those featuring sex and romance. More than half of 1,500 Gen Z-ers interviewed by UCLA researchers last year complained that mainstream media overuse sex and romance. This generational shift towards “nomance” has had a sizeable impact on Hollywood’s increasingly sexless output. Alongside the similarly subversive, carnal Saltburn and Challengers, Babygirl is bucking the trend.
“I agree with these young people, because I’m a little bit like that myself,” Reijn says. “A lot of our movie is all in the mind. It can be shocking to see a woman crawl around, but it’s all suggestion. I connect to this generation that is kind of afraid of sex. I don’t think it’s a good thing, but I do understand it. I love to watch people kiss, but I don’t like to watch very in-your-face sex scenes. I don’t find it all that arousing.
“For me, what is happening in our film is very sexy. I do think it’s important to bring sex back after #MeToo, which was an incredible movement – and I was very much part of that movement. Now is the time to slowly open up and to see how can we desire each other in a new space where, luckily, we are more equal.”
Halina Reijn was born in Amsterdam but spent her childhood near Groningen, where she developed an early passion for theatre and acting. The middle sister of three born to two artists, Fleur and Frank, she describes her upbringing as unconventional. Her father, despite being married to her mother, was gay. The girls grew up without television in the bohemian village of Wildervank.
“We were raised off the grid, and I never knew what normal was,” the director says. “I became obsessed with any group behaviour or subculture. So I’m obsessed with young people. I read everything about them. I look at everything they’re looking at. I don’t have children. I don’t have a family. I always wanted to, but it didn’t happen for me. This is maybe my way of mothering. I have friends of all ages because I was raised by these hippies who were very artistic.”
Reijn began her stage career as Ophelia, in a production of Hamlet by the Dutch theatre company De Trust in 1997, and has subsequently taken on lead roles in Hedda Gabbler, Three Sisters and The Taming of the Shrew, as well as appearing opposite Jude Law in a stage version of Obsession, Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film. In 2011 she appeared at Dublin Theatre Festival in a visiting production of La Voix Humaine, by Jean Cocteau. It was, my colleague Mick Heaney wrote in his review, a remarkable performance.
“I was most inspired by Hedda Gabler for this particular film,” Reijn says. “She was trapped in a marriage in crisis and couldn’t see a way out. Hedda and The Taming of the Shrew and Ophelia, I played every single one of those characters for so long I can’t shake them. They’ve been most educational. Because all of them committed suicide or went psychotic. I wanted to create a movie where the woman doesn’t commit suicide.”
Reijn has appeared in dozens of TV shows and films, including Peter Greenaway’s Goltzius & the Pelican Company, the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie and, alongside van Houten, Verhoeven’s Black Book.
Instinct, which came out in 2019, was the first film for which Reijn moved to the other side of the camera. Last year she scored her first US hit with the impossibly hip, Gen Z-friendly Bodies Bodies Bodies. Babygirl is her second production with A24, the equally vogueish studio.
“I founded my production company Man Up way before #MeToo. I spent years knocking on doors,” Reijn says. “Everybody said that our female gaze was redundant. I would not be sitting at this table talking to you if it wasn’t for #MeToo and the feminist movement.”
Babygirl is in cinemas from Friday, January 10th
