Babygirl

Snapshot

Babygirl is a psychosexual drama-thriller in which Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman), the celebrated CEO of a New York automation and robotics firm, enters a clandestine, dominance-and-submission-inflected affair with a much younger intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), jeopardizing her marriage to theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas) and her carefully engineered public self. Written and directed by the Dutch actress-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn — her third feature and second for A24 — the film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, where Kidman won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. It arrived as one of the most discussed entries in the decade's revival of the erotic thriller, but it deliberately bends that genre toward comedy, confession, and a study of female desire and shame rather than toward menace and murder. Its central preoccupation is not whether the affair will be discovered but whether Romy can acknowledge, without self-destruction, what she actually wants.

Industry & production

Babygirl is an A24 film, produced in partnership with the production company 2AM and Reijn's own banner. It belongs to A24's continuing strategy of pairing distinctive auteur voices with recognizable stars in mid-budget, adult-oriented dramas — the kind of film that the major studios had largely ceded by the 2020s. The casting of Kidman is central to the picture's industrial logic: she is both a bankable name and an actress with a long, self-aware history in transgressive and erotically charged material, and the production leans on that history as text. Harris Dickinson, rising from Beach Rats (2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2022), and Antonio Banderas, himself an icon of an earlier era of screen sensuality, round out a cast engineered for intergenerational friction. Sophie Wilde (Talk to Me) plays Romy's assistant Esme, a Gen-Z figure who becomes a source of institutional threat. The film's festival launch at Venice, its awards traction for Kidman, and a platform theatrical release through A24 in late 2024 follow the standard prestige-adult-drama pathway.

Technology

The film was shot digitally and finished for standard theatrical exhibition; it does not foreground any novel capture or post-production technology, and there is no strong public record of it being a technical showcase. More interesting is how technology functions within the story. Romy's company builds warehouse automation and robotics — she is, literally, in the business of controlling non-human bodies and optimizing systems — and the film uses this as an ironic frame for a woman who cannot master her own drives. Screens, surveillance, and the frictionless surfaces of corporate life recur, and the affair itself is partly conducted through the mediated intimacy of phones and messages. The thematic use of automation as a metaphor for control, obedience, and the fantasy of programmable desire is the film's most pointed engagement with technology.

Technique

Cinematography

The cinematography is credited to Jasper Wolf, the Dutch cinematographer who also shot Reijn's Instinct (2019) and Alejandro Landes's Monos (2019). The visual scheme sets the cool, glassy, controlled surfaces of Romy's corporate and domestic worlds against warmer, closer, more destabilized framings in the affair's private spaces. The camera favors Kidman's face in tight registers, tracking micro-expressions of shame, arousal, and calculation, and it repeatedly places her behind glass, in mirrors, and within the hard geometry of offices and apartments — a visual grammar of a woman observed and self-surveilling.

Editing

The cutting shapes the film's tonal instability, holding uncomfortably long on moments of exposure and vulnerability while clipping briskly through the executive routine, so that the erotic scenes feel suspended and the public scenes feel armored. (Precise editorial credits and specific montage strategies are less thoroughly documented in the public record than the film's performances and direction, and I will not overstate them.)

Mise-en-scène / staging

Reijn stages Babygirl as a series of controlled environments that Romy is forever trying to keep sealed: the boardroom, the townhouse, the marital bed, the hotel room. Production design contrasts the sterile luxury of wealth with the makeshift, almost furtive settings of the affair. The film's most cited set pieces — an opening in which Romy performs an orgasm for her husband and then retreats to masturbate alone, and the recurring motif of Samuel wielding small acts of command (the notorious glass of milk, the murmured approval) — are staged as intimate power negotiations, choreographed around who gives and who takes permission. The blocking consistently dramatizes control and its surrender.

Sound

Sound and music are among the film's most distinctive elements. The score is credited to Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, the Chilean-Canadian composer known for the vocalized, percussive, unsettling textures of Utopia and The White Lotus; his idiom of warped voices and rhythmic tension suits a film about compulsion. (There were public reports of friction between the composer and the production over the music; I flag this only as a matter of record and won't characterize its details beyond that.) The film also uses pop needle-drops as ironic and emotional counterpoint — George Michael's "Father Figure" is among the tracks associated with the picture, its lyric of paternal-erotic authority resonating pointedly with the film's dynamics.

Performance

Performance is where the film's reputation was made. Kidman's Romy is a study in maintained composure cracking from within — the Volpi Cup recognized a turn that is physically exposed and emotionally naked, willing to render need, humiliation, and appetite without vanity. Dickinson plays Samuel as opaque and improvisational, a young man whose apparent dominance is itself uncertain and half-performed, which keeps the power dynamic genuinely ambiguous. Banderas brings a wounded, generous dignity to the betrayed husband, and Wilde's Esme introduces a sharp generational and institutional counter-pressure.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film operates in a confessional, ironic-melodramatic mode rather than a suspense-thriller one. Its engine is not a whodunit or a stalker plot but the internal question of self-knowledge: can Romy name and integrate a desire she has spent a lifetime suppressing? The dramatic stakes are marital, professional, and psychological, and the film repeatedly undercuts the erotic-thriller expectation of catastrophe with tonal shifts into awkward comedy and tenderness. This is a deliberate authorial choice — Reijn withholds the genre's usual punitive machinery, refusing to make transgressive female desire automatically fatal.

Genre & cycle

Babygirl is a self-conscious entry in the erotic thriller, a genre that peaked commercially in the late 1980s and 1990s and was revived in the 2020s. It sits alongside contemporaries such as Deep Water (2022), Fair Play (2023), and — as a study of desire, ambition, and control — Challengers (2024), all part of a wave reclaiming adult sexuality for the screen after years of its retreat to streaming and prestige television. But Babygirl is as much a critique of the cycle as an instance of it: it invokes the corporate-affair thriller and the BDSM romance (the Fifty Shades cultural moment is an unavoidable reference point) in order to interrogate their gender politics, replacing the older cycle's male gaze and its punishment of the transgressive woman with a female-authored account of submission as something a powerful woman might choose.

Authorship & method

Reijn wrote and directed Babygirl, and it reads as personal and thesis-driven. A prominent Dutch stage and screen actress before turning to direction, she brings an actor's method to intimacy: the film has been discussed as depending on trust, choreography, and the careful negotiation of vulnerable scenes, consistent with the contemporary practice of intimacy coordination. Her collaborators extend relationships from her earlier work — cinematographer Jasper Wolf continues a partnership begun on Instinct — while composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer imports a television-honed sensibility for unease. Reijn's authorship is defined by taking genre containers (the survival thriller in Instinct, the slasher in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the erotic thriller here) and hollowing them out to examine power, performance, and the social scripts governing women's behavior.

Movement / national cinema

Reijn is a Dutch filmmaker, and Babygirl can be read against the tradition of Dutch cinema's frank, provocative treatment of sexuality and power most famously associated with Paul Verhoeven — a lineage of confrontational eroticism and moral ambiguity that Reijn, working now in an English-language American context, both inherits and revises for a post-#MeToo, female-authored frame. The film is otherwise firmly a product of the American independent-prestige ecosystem (A24, New York setting, Hollywood stars), making it a transatlantic hybrid: Dutch sensibility, American industry.

Era / period

Babygirl is emphatically a film of the mid-2020s. It is legible only against the aftermath of #MeToo, which reshaped how the screen can depict workplace sex, consent, and the asymmetries of power between an older female superior and a younger male subordinate — the film pointedly inverts the era's default template. It is equally a film about generational difference, setting a Gen-X executive against Gen-Z employees fluent in the vocabulary of boundaries and exposure, and about the specific anxieties of aging, ambition, and desire for women in that cohort.

Themes

The film's core theme is the conflict between a woman's public mastery and her private, shame-laden appetite — the fantasy of surrender as a relief from the exhausting labor of control. Around this it develops several linked concerns: the persistence of female shame and the difficulty of naming one's own desire; consent, power, and their ambiguity when the hierarchy of age and workplace is reversed; marriage, honesty, and the long negotiation of long-term intimacy; motherhood and the female body under scrutiny; and, through Romy's automation business, the seductive fantasy of programmable, obedient bodies set against the ungovernable reality of human wanting. The film treats submission not as pathology or degradation but as something that, acknowledged, might be integrated.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception centered on Kidman, whose performance drew wide acclaim and the Venice Volpi Cup, and on Reijn's decision to route the erotic thriller through comedy and psychological candor; reviews frequently praised the film's daring and its lead while noting that viewers expecting a conventional thriller's menace would find something stranger and more tender. Looking backward, the film's clear lines of influence run through the erotic thrillers and desire-dramas of the past half-century: 9½ Weeks (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Basic Instinct (1992) as the corporate-and-passion template it revises; Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002) as its most direct precursor in treating office dominance-and-submission as a path to self-realization rather than ruin; Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) as a foundational text of respectable female fantasy; and, unavoidably, the Fifty Shades phenomenon as the mass-culture backdrop it answers with adult seriousness. Kidman's own filmography — Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Jane Campion's In the Cut (2003) — functions as intertext the film knowingly exploits. Looking forward, Babygirl consolidated the 2020s erotic-thriller revival and, more specifically, modeled a female-authored, female-perspective reworking of the genre that refuses to punish its heroine — a template likely to shape how filmmakers approach desire, consent, and power on screen. As the film is recent, its longer-term canonical standing remains to be seen, and I won't overstate a legacy still forming.