Babygirl and the Return of the Corporate Erotic

The American erotic thriller, as a studio genre, effectively died sometime in the early 2000s. Basic Instinct (1992), Fatal Attraction (1987), Disclosure (1994), 9½ Weeks (1986), the lineage ran out. The reasons were multiple: the rise of prestige television as the venue for adult drama, the specific corporate aversion to the mid-budget adult film, the cultural reassessment of the specific gender politics those films trafficked in. By the mid-2010s, the genre was essentially defunct in theatrical exhibition, with occasional direct-to-streaming exceptions.

Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, released on Christmas Day 2024, is the first American theatrical erotic drama in roughly a decade that functions at the level of craft its predecessors achieved. It is also, interestingly, the first film of its kind directed by a woman to be given the full studio-adjacent release. A year on, both facts matter.

What the film is

Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is the CEO of a New York-based robotics-logistics company. She is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a Broadway theatre director. She has two daughters. She has, across a corporate career spanning roughly two decades, achieved the specific kind of quiet American professional success that would not be narratively interesting if she were a man, and is narratively interesting here partly because it remains unusual for a woman to occupy this kind of role in an American film.

Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a twenty-something intern in her company’s graduate programme, initiates an encounter with her that becomes an affair. The affair involves a specific power dynamic in which Samuel takes the controlling position, despite his junior status in the corporate hierarchy and his considerable age gap below her. The film is about what Romy finds in the dynamic, what it costs her to sustain, and what it reveals about the specific architecture of her adult life.

The Reijn argument

Halina Reijn, a Dutch director whose previous features were Instinct (2019) and the English-language slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), has a specific theoretical interest in the relationship between female power and female desire, and Babygirl is the clearest statement of that interest she has yet made. The film’s governing argument is that the specific forms of autonomy available to high-achieving professional women in the contemporary American workplace may be incompatible with the specific forms of vulnerability they want to experience in their sexual lives, and that the incompatibility is a thing worth depicting on screen without moralising.

This is a specific argument, and it is a brave one. The film refuses several of the easier framings that similar material has historically used. Romy is not secretly miserable in her marriage. Samuel is not secretly malicious in his pursuit of her. The affair does not produce a specific catastrophe for Romy’s career. The film does not treat Romy’s desire as a pathology to be cured or a transgression to be punished. It is, in the specific sense the film insists on, a fact about her that she has to integrate into the rest of her life.

The Kidman performance

Nicole Kidman’s Romy is the performance around which the film is built. Kidman, who has across her long career specialised in specifically opaque female characters whose interior lives operate at a specific distance from their external composure, plays Romy as a particular kind of late-career CEO whose entire adult identity has been organised around the maintenance of that distance.

The performance is built out of specific small observations. Romy’s posture in meetings (specifically contained, specifically composed). Her voice in negotiations (specifically controlled, specifically measured). Her habits in domestic space (specifically alert to her children’s emotional states, specifically alert to her husband’s professional ones). When the affair with Samuel begins to pull against these maintained postures, Kidman plays the pulling as a specific physical experience, a specific loosening of the held body, and the loosening is visibly costly to her.

The scene most frequently cited from the film is the hotel-room milk sequence. I will not describe it in detail. What is worth saying is that the scene is not staged for shock. It is staged as a specific exposure, a specific moment at which Romy has to decide whether the thing she has been rehearsing internally is a thing she is willing to perform externally. Kidman plays the decision across a specific held pause, and the pause is the scene.

Dickinson, doing the harder work

Harris Dickinson’s Samuel is the performance less discussed and probably more difficult. Samuel has to be a specifically convincing object of Romy’s desire, a specifically believable initiator of the power dynamic, and a specifically not-predatory young man whose interest in Romy is specifically about her rather than about her position. Dickinson plays him with a specific careful restraint that avoids the two easier readings: the calculating manipulator and the sweet confused boy.

The specific choice worth naming is Dickinson’s refusal to play Samuel as a fantasy projection. Samuel has specific preferences, specific limits, specific awkwardnesses. He is a specifically real twenty-something rather than an idealised one. The film’s ethical seriousness about the affair requires this refusal, and Dickinson provides it.

Jasper Wolf’s camera

Jasper Wolf, the Dutch cinematographer who has shot Reijn’s previous features, brings a specific clinical quality to the film’s visual register. Corporate interiors (glass walls, LED-panel lighting, the specific blue-grey palette of executive floor plates) are shot with a particular coolness. Domestic interiors (the Mathis family townhouse) are shot with a specifically warmer register. Hotel rooms, where most of the affair takes place, sit between: neither corporate nor domestic, specifically liminal.

The visual strategy reinforces the film’s argument that Romy’s affair is occupying a specific psychological space outside the specific architectures (corporate, domestic) that organise the rest of her life. The hotel rooms are where the film’s specific interiority happens. The corporate scenes are where it is hidden. The domestic scenes are where it is negotiated.

The ending, disputed

The film’s final act, which I will not spoil in detail, resolves in a specific way that some viewers found evasive and others found honest. The disagreement is worth flagging. The film declines to either catastrophise the affair or to fully endorse it. Romy’s marriage does not collapse. Her career does not collapse. The affair ends, and she absorbs it into the rest of her life.

The reading that finds this evasive argues that the film has set up a specific crisis and then refused to dramatise its consequences. The reading that finds this honest argues that the film is depicting a specific recognisable contemporary adult reality: that high-achieving adults can have affairs, can end them, and can continue their lives, and that the catastrophic framing of earlier erotic thrillers was itself a specific Hollywood convention rather than a truth about how these situations actually resolve.

I find the second reading more persuasive. The film is, among other things, a specific correction to the moralising instincts of the genre it is reviving.

Where it sits

Babygirl grossed approximately $44 million on a reported $20 million budget, which is commercially respectable for the genre at this scale. Kidman won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for the performance. The awards-season trajectory in the United States was less dominant than some expected, with Kidman not receiving an Oscar nomination.

The film will, I think, be remembered as the specific revival of a dormant genre and as one of Kidman’s most controlled late-career performances. Reijn’s next project is not yet announced. Whatever it is, it will likely continue the specific theoretical project Babygirl has established. Watch the film without the lights on. The specific interiority it offers is the specific interiority worth meeting on its own terms.