Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in Dark Thriller 5

Halina Reijn’s 2022 English-language debut, Bodies Bodies Bodies, was a slender but enjoyably nasty slasher whodunnit that poked around in its Gen Z characters’ heads. The Dutch director’s more complex new film, Babygirl, is an erotic thriller that again considers the ways in which young people are wired differently, knowing what they want and how to get it but maybe also what the rest of us want, too. That’s more of a cheeky side note, however, in the story of a middle-aged woman — played with physical and psychological fearlessness by Nicole Kidman — finding liberation by surrendering to her repressed desires.

Sexy, dark and unpredictable, with a tone that mixes tension and caustic humor, the movie occupies a thematic landscape not so distant from Reijn’s 2019 debut feature, Instinct, about a female prison therapist drawn into a risky infatuation with a rapist. As in that film, Babygirl repeatedly asks who’s in control in a dangerous game of seduction that keeps shifting the lines in its consideration of desire, gender roles and power dynamics. There are also distinct shades of Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, though the perspective here is very much female.

Kidman plays Romy Mathis, CEO of a New York automation firm whose latest development is a goods delivery system for Amazon-type warehouses. She has two teenage daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly), and a successful theater-director husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), whom she’s straddles naked and rides to a gasping climax in the attention-getting opening scene.

We soon learn that part of Romy’s role in the bedroom is performative, when she flits down the hall after Jacob falls asleep and brings herself to orgasm watching daddy porn. In a later scene, she encourages her husband to be more aggressive in their sex play, which mostly makes him giggle with embarrassment.  

Right off the bat, Reijn establishes that Romy, despite a few brittle edges, is no one’s clichéd picture of a driven businesswoman. Instead of the usual power suits, she wears luxe cashmere wrap coats and sash-collar dresses and blouses in floaty fabrics and delicate prints, subtly hinting that she’s a woman of many layers. She also treats her staff decently, though her admiring executive assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), is frustrated in her attempts to talk about her prospects for promotion.

Romy is all about careful control, so she’s caught off guard when Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a fresh recruit in the intern program, puts her on the spot with a question about the compatibility of automation and sustainability. Samuel has already caught her eye outside the office, when she watches him step in and calm a barking dog that’s off its leash and scaring everyone else on the sidewalk. While it’s slightly on the nose, that dog incident will be wryly echoed in developments to come.

Subsequent encounters with Samuel confirm, in both his loose body language and his blunt words, that he’s not intimidated by Romy’s position. At the office holiday party, he informs her that he’s chosen to partner with her in the mentor program, and despite her insistence that she’s too busy to participate, Romy shows up for their scheduled 10-minute meeting.

As Samuel questions her about how she got her start and what path brought her to where she is today, the subject of power comes up. He throws her for a loop when he casually observes, “I think you like to be told what to do.” That inappropriate remark ends the meeting, but Samuel blocks her at the door with a kiss.

There’s some amusing cat and mouse negotiation, including a hilariously impudent gesture from Samuel during an office drinks evening. But soon he gets down to business, leaving her a note summoning her with an address and time. That first assignation (in a tacky hotel clearly way below Romy’s standards) shows her bristling and resisting Samuel’s advances, claiming she’s only there to put a stop to his behavior. But she’s not convincing and he’s not deterred. Nor is he averse to the blackmail suggestion of an HR call to get the upper hand.

Reijn knowingly teases out this set-up like a ‘90s sexual stalker thriller — an inspiration furthered by DP Jasper Wolf’s sharp visuals — but keeps upending those expectations. Working with great discipline and with zero timidity, the writer-director is unafraid to provoke feminist indignation by revealing Romy’s complicity in her subjugation. Watching Kidman hike up her elegant gown to get on all fours and lap up a saucer of milk is both horrifying and funny.

Samuel should, by rights, be a creep, but his cocky behavior is also awkward and uncertain, with nervous laughter when she doesn’t immediately comply with his demands. As their sexual trysts become more frequent, he shows sensitivity toward her vulnerabilities and an instinct for her needs, eventually exposing a few of his own.

Dickinson’s unforced intensity makes him a magnetic screen presence and although he imbues Samuel with an element of threat, the actor never lets us mistake him for a predator or crazy control freak. The actor hasn’t exuded this much undiluted sexuality since Beach Rats.

Kidman is in spectacular form, swinging from outrage to fear to ravenously lustful consent. The constant shifts in control during a steamy night they spend together — this time at a high-end hotel clearly chosen and paid for by Romy — have her in submissive mode one minute, swallowing her shame while stripping naked, and sitting back in a plush robe the next, admiring Samuel as he dances shirtless in the middle of the room.

The winking song choice, George Michael’s “Father Figure,” is one of a handful of punchy needle drops, along with Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart,” that augment a fabulously eclectic, mood-shaping score by Chilean-born Canadian composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer.

Eventually, the stop-start clandestine relationship does threaten to destroy what’s dearest to Romy — at home when she makes a partial confession to Jacob, talking evasively of having dark thoughts in her head since she was a child, and at work after it emerges that Samuel is also seeing Esme.

Wilde, the Australian discovery from Talk to Me, brings sly notes of humor to Esme’s power play when she uses knowledge of her boyfriend’s other relationship for her own advancement and starts blending corporate-speak with virtue-signaling buzzwords like “radical self-honesty.”

Someone’s life normally gets destroyed in the standard template for movies like this, but here even the most potentially explosive situations unfold in unanticipated ways — notably when Jacob and Samuel come face to face in a physical clash, in one of two moments when Banderas’ gentle-natured nice guy fires up into rage.

Jacob makes the disgusted assumption that his wife, because of her power position, must be pulling the strings in a domination-subjugation arrangement. In one of the movie’s drollest moments, Samuel casually informs him, with unruffled Gen Z self-assurance, “No, that’s an outdated idea about sexuality.”

There are lovely moments between Romy and her daughters, particularly Isabel, a cool young lesbian with a bleached mullet who fooled around on her own girlfriend and uses that experience to reassure her mother that forgiveness is attainable. The brief scene is a very sweet child-parent role reversal.

Kidman also gets to show chilly command in a delicious encounter with an oily HR manager (Victor Slezak) who insinuates having compromising knowledge as a stepping stone to hooking up with Romy.

Ultimately, Babygirl is about a woman coming to accept that her full spectrum of desires is legitimate and no cause for shame, and that control can be pleasurably elastic, rather than something to be held in a vise-like grip. What makes it entertaining is not just the actors’ skilled navigation of every tricky challenge but also the script’s refusal of judgement and rigid moral codes. The film doesn’t go terribly deep and could stand to be 10 minutes shorter, but it’s perverse, juicy fun of a kind we don’t get much of anymore.