I watched Babygirl at Essex Regal in the Lower East Side with four friends last Sunday night. We went into it expecting a female fantasy film in the vein of Fifty Shades, another story about universal female desire packaged neatly for mass consumption. We did not get that.
Instead, we got something far weirder: a deeply personal exploration of one woman's specific, strange, and uncomfortable desires. The director, Halina Reijn, lays bare her own perverse fantasies with a brazen honesty that made us all shift in our seats - watching it felt like going through someone’s most personal belongings or reading their darkest thoughts, ones that are usually supposed to stay buried.
Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a CEO who risks her perfect life-- job, husband, kids, to live out her deepest and darkest fantasies with her new intern, Samuel. Harris Dickinson moves through the film with this perfect understanding of his role - he's not playing a universal male fantasy object, but rather a very specific figure in someone's very specific fantasy. It's jarring in the best way, and the writing is subtly brilliant. In bed, Romy calls Samuel a “lovely person” who knows things about what people want and need. Samuel responds, “I scare myself.” Their relationship is both difficult to watch and impossible to look away from. Harris Dickinson embodies this tension perfectly.
Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Romy lands somewhere between mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. She embodies this character with real commitment - not because of any explicit content, but because of how thoroughly she exposes Romy's psychological landscape.
Her face transforms when she looks at Samuel, somewhere between hunger and terror. This isn’t your typical affair story, here we see a woman possessed by desires she herself doesn’t fully understand. She doesn't play Romy as someone engaging in a typical affair narrative. It’s not just desire, it’s more complicated and less palatable. And thankfully, these desires aren’t presented as revelatory or empowering; they’re just there, raw and unprocessed.
Despite all the heated chemistry, the actual sex scenes in Babygirl are uneasy rather than erotic. They feel awkward and serve as examinations of power and desperation. The director frames these moments as psychological excavations.
The genius of the film lies partly in how it handles power. In a cultural moment where we're desperate to make neat categories of predator and prey, victim and perpetrator, Babygirl presents something messier. Romy's position as CEO should make the power dynamic clear - she's the boss, she's older, she has everything to lose. But the film keeps undermining this. Samuel’s youth becomes his weapon, Romy’s authority becomes her prison. Does she have the upper hand, or does he, because he can take her perfect life away in one phone call?
In an era where stories about desire typically come with a built-in moral compass, Babygirl offers no such comfort. It forces us to sit with our own discomfort about what it means to want things we can’t justify. Maybe that’s why it feels so transgressive. This movie doesn't want to be your fantasy - it's content being someone else's, and that's what makes it compelling. Meanwhile, I’ll be patiently awaiting Harris Dickinson’s next move.
Olivia Morrison
Hank Dobson
Brittany Menjivar
Anonymous