Babygirl Movie Review 2025: Nicole Kidman’s Erotic Drama Is Unsatisfying And Worst

Babygirl

Director: Halina Reijn

Editor's Rating:
2

Pros

• Nicole Kidman’s captivating performance.
• Emotionally charged storytelling.
• Strong chemistry between the lead characters.
• Beautifully crafted visuals and music.

Cons

• Occasional predictability in the plot.
• Some subplots lack depth.
• Pacing slows in the middle.
• Limited focus on supporting characters.

The babygirl movie review is a deep dive into Nicole Kidman’s heart-wrenching portrayal of a mother navigating complex family dynamics. The first scene in Babygirl, the sexy drama from Dutch writer and director Halina Reijn that is currently up for several awards, is probably the most sexy. Both Romy Mathis (Kidman) and her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) have an orgasm in the bed together at the beginning of the movie. But while Jacob is sleeping soundly after a good night’s sleep, Romy runs down the hall.

The shot of Kidman’s bare, apple-cheeked behind makes me think of her first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 movie Eyes Wide Shut, which is one of many sexy movies from the 1990s that Reijn wants to bring up and turn on its head through the female gaze. We see a private ritual going on in another room. She falls to the ground and forces herself to come to the toilet, this time for real. Her hands desperately flutter across the keyboard of a laptop.

Babygirl Movie Review: Nicole Kidman’s sex-positive erotic thriller doesn’t have enough danger.

It’s a strong start to a movie, kind of like a statement: this movie, which comes out at a time when Hollywood has been moving away from sexy movies for a long time, isn’t really about sex but about women’s desire. We hear Romy’s sounds when she’s pretending to be someone she’s not in less than two minutes. They are a mess of lust, shame, inner chaos, lying, and realising who she is. She, like many women, feels like desire is like getting lost in a maze. It’s not linear, it can catch fire, and it’s hard to fully understand.

Plot Of Nicole Kidman’s Babygirl Movie:

That is, she is a bundle of potential energy that Samuel set on fire, like a deus ex machina in the form of an intern. Romy, the 50-something CEO of a vaguely described robotics company, first sees Samuel, played by the 28-year-old actor Harris Dickinson, sternly commanding a loose dog. Samuel somehow knows that what Romy really wants is a firm hand to nuzzle herself. It’s not a spoiler to say that they start a quick, hot, but coolly talked about affair with a light dom/sub dynamic during the longest and horniest Christmas season ever, putting Romy’s cold stability and her personal and professional lives at risk.

According to the show’s marketing and premise, Babygirl is about power dynamics and the driving, confusing, and possibly destroying power of lust. Romy is the boss and an older woman who wants to change who she is in private, and Samuel is the underling who takes charge. In real life, it’s a mess; it’s not clear what it’s after, just like Romy is.

At times, the movie flirts with a traumatic explanation for Romy’s sub preferences, implying through flashbacks that it has something to do with growing up in a cult (or, more simply, “my fucking childhood”); as if there’s something abnormal about being on the dom/sub spectrum, being drawn to the extremes of power, or wanting to take the risk of hurting yourself.

It’s true that Reijn creates a tough tension. Romy is, on the one hand, collapsing in thin air. She’s a CEO woman in beige cashmere who lives in a New York flat with floor-to-ceiling windows. She has a lot of money. Reijn, on the other hand, seems to be interested in more common themes, such as the orgasm gap (Romy eventually says she has never climaxed with her husband of 19 years, which I found hard to believe), and society’s deep disinterest in female pleasure, which many women take to be shame.

People go through a midlife crisis, the stresses of getting older, and try to break out of their domestic, professional, or personal roles, or at least figure out how to make the contradictions make sense to them.

Even talking about these things, which are mostly off-screen and unspoken, gives people a boost, a release, or a sense of relief. The bravest part of Kidman’s performance—not because she wasn’t scared, but because she pushed through it for something truly shocking—may be when she puts her face under a clinical white light and a Botox needle as Romy. This blurs the line between Kidman as an actress whose face is so stiff that she can only play rich women and the female CEO who has to deal with the constant pressures of ageing.

Like another recent buzzy movie, The Substance, which stars a famous middle-aged actor from the 1990s and was directed by a woman from Europe, Babygirl gets major points for going there, even if the review is more fizzle than pop.

Besides the sex, though, and the sex is what this is all about. Not because Babygirl should explain why Romy wants to submit (there doesn’t have to be a why!), but because it only briefly looks at how she does it. How Samuel pushes Romy’s limits, and how Romy lets them be pushed with a palpable mix of fear, shame, and shock; how both of them enjoy going off-script. Those scenes—at an office storage room that doesn’t look like much and the start of dom/sub play at a hotel—are tight and genuinely surprising.

They are some of my favourites of the year, though they may not be as out there as some may hope. (However, my screening was full of nervous laughter and many “whats?” said out loud.) Babygirl shows how sexy everything is except for penetrative sex, which we only see briefly, almost as a conclusion to everything else. It also jumps between a workplace thriller, an erotic thriller, and a family drama, never settling on one and always slicing the difference.

Even so, this Babygirl movie is still surprising because people don’t see many sex-themed films and it’s not often that the focus is on women’s sexual experiences after age 30. There’s no doubt that I grade on a curve. Babygirl finds it hard to connect the specifics of these characters’ wants—or really, just Romy’s, since Dickinson’s Samuel is an escape hatch for her and a puzzle for us—with the politics of it all. Romy wants to disappear, feels the pull of destroying herself, gets into a dangerous situation, and? She clearly broke the rules about HR, but she also found freedom for herself.

But sex never happens in a vacuum, and? So, there are times when the movie is provocative and shocking, but it never goes beyond the realm of contained and sometimes sublime fantasy. For example, Reijn drops the needle on George Michael’s Father Figure during a rendezvous after a milk-slurping standoff. Nicole Kidman Babygirl is very much a movie of its time. Its visual style is more important than its plot, its moments than its overall cohesion, and its premise and star power more than anything else. It’s not exactly what the ads said it would be, but it’s still a lot better than nothing.

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