‘Babygirl’ – Review
Prepare to leave your inhibitions at the door with Halina Reijn’s Babygirl because this is a picture that will push all your buttons and then some.
A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern.
Director Halina Reijn completely pushes all of the boundaries, both in regard to narrative, character and the complete experience of the audience with Babygirl, her twisty, intense, chaotic, ravishing and wild erotic thriller of power and control. Framed from the point of Nicole Kidman’s high-powered CEO Romy Mathis, who becomes infatuated with young intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) and who becomes entangled in a game of power that is all about the give and take. This is a picture that takes audiences completely by surprise, and it is truly not what you expect. If you go into this with your own expectations of what Baygirl might be, well, you’ll be in for a complete shock, and Reijn’s originality and unique framing and point of view keep you on edge the whole time.
For Nicole Kidman, an Academy Award-winning performer who is now judged as one of the best actresses of the 21st Century, Babygirl is a role that allows her to cut loose, and you’ve never seen her portray a character like this before. By day, Romy Mathis is a high-powered CEO who has all the answers and is always five moves ahead, but secretly, in the hidden hours of the night, she is a woman plagued by distress, repressed memories, and a burning and unfulfilled sexual desires that are now guiding her to riskier and riskier behaviours. She is a woman who has never felt the fullest extent of sexual satisfaction with a partner, and this drives her to extremes in order to find the roots of her missing pleasures. Kidman bares all, both physically and psychologically, in this performance, and Babygirl’s framing of a woman discovering her own pleasure and animalistic happiness makes for an edgy and excellent watch.
Pulling Kidman’s Romy into this dark journey of sexual discovery and hedonistic freedom is Harris Dickinson’s Samuel, an intern at her company who’s dominant characteristics and dark triad traits awaken in her a fire that she’s never known. Dickinson’s Samuel is a character with many sides to him, and his dark energy and the control he begins to exert over Romy will shock and excite audiences as he pushes her to new extremes.
The whole experience of Babygirl is a feeling that will push you to the edge, and Reijn pushes every boundary in this hedonistic tale of extremes. With little dialogue, much of the film is delivered through raw performance and expression, and for Kidman, this is a story of a woman who completely exposes all her flaws, faults, and secrets to the audience. Reijn pushes the film’s sexual content to its greatest extent, but none of it is used in a gratuitous manner, and instead, Romy’s exploration of her truest desires feeds into the character study of this conflicted and flawed person. Reijn and Kidman hide nothing in telling this story; instead, this narrative is a story that examines female desire and the consequences of its repression.
The experience of Babygirl is a thoroughly modern and thumping piece of cinema with visuals and music colliding together for a totally unique cinematic experience. Cinematographer Jasper Wolf and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer work in tandem to help realise Reijn’s vision of an ethereal dream of pleasure and discovery, with an almost fairytale-style quality to the picture embued in the way in which it is captured.
Babygirl is a boundary-pushing piece of cinema that completely shakes up notions of the erotic thriller genre with a director and performer who have thrown caution to the wind and who find new territory of expression and rhythm because of it. It’s a wild, shocking, and completely original piece of cinema storytelling, and your endorphins will be raging by the time the end credits roll.
Image: Roadshow
