In its deliciously playful provocations, filmmaker Halina Reijn’s Babygirl explores the tender, the wickedly funny, and the unexpectedly romantic places that a certain kind of repression can lead to, and where someone will go to find release.
The journey began when a friend once told Halina Reijn about a woman who, across her entire 25-year marriage, had never experienced an orgasm with her husband. She was both awed by and in some ways unsurprised by that possibility.
In Babygirl, Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, is a product of this internalization. As a polished CEO and a mother and wife living in New York City, she lives in a world of careful control, tight scheduling, and an all-too-keen awareness of how she’s perceived at the heights of a male-dominated field. In her own long-term marriage, she has also never truly found pleasure with her sweet, caring, and artistically driven husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas).
As Romy attempts to hold together her gilded persona, she is quickly undone after she meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an intern who appears to her almost as an angel come to rescue and torment her from within her cage of suppressed desire. Im- mediately he clocks her, seeing in her a desire to finally lose control, and he begins to prod beyond the surfaces she has so carefully constructed.
So begins an unconventional love affair between the high-powered female CEO and her young, audaciously puckish male intern. It’s a cat and mouse set-up, one in which the axis of power is constantly, thrillingly shifting, and which at first glance resembles the heyday of sexual thrillers in the ‘90s.
If Reijn was confronted with the contradiction of sexuality impressed upon women in society — to be constantly sexual- ized and yet to never exercise agency — she found vindication and solace, if a conflicted form of it, in the movies’ depiction of women getting what they want. “Those movies, when I saw them, they were like, ‘Oh, actually, it’s not so crazy, all these things that are going on in my head!’” she says. “These movies are super dear to me, but of course they are almost all directed by men, all written by men.”
The genre is a male-dominated lineage, from Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. “I really decided in the beginning, I want to make a sexual film, just as sexual as all these films that I’ve always admired so much, but now I’m going to do it completely through female eyes. What does that mean and what does that look like?”
In Reijn’s hands, the genre’s deliberate goading of sexual mores becomes something deeply human and bitingly fun, an erotic thriller for an age where everything is permitted, but the American puritanical moral impulses still run deep. And ulti- mately, at the core of the forbidden fruit is a seductive, tender act of self-acceptance for its protagonist.
“My question was about self-love. Mainly, how do I love all parts of myself?” Reijn says. This line of thinking was inspired by Ver- hoeven, who directed Reijn, an actress before she became an acclaimed filmmaker, in a major supporting role in Black Book. “Paul Verhoeven always told me I could only make a movie if I had a specific question. For this story I wondered: Are we an- imals or are we civilized? Can we make peace with the animal inside of us? Is it possible for the different parts of ourselves to co-exist and, in turn, for us to love our whole selves without shame?”
These ideas and Reijn’s approach — to take the edgy, titillating mold of sexual thrillers and witness it through a distinctly contemporary female gaze — was an utterly new experience for Kidman, who speaks about her time shooting the film as a fever dream of sorts.
“I’ve made many sexual films, but this is different,” Kidman says. “Doing this subject matter in the hands of the woman that wrote the script, that’s directing it and is a really great actress herself — we became one in a weird way, which I’d never had with a director before. When you’re working with a woman on this subject matter, you can share everything with each other.”
In Kidman’s tour de force turn is a fractured and unusually re- latable portrait of a woman conflicted by her own desires, a performance of a certain kind of powerful, tightly-wound, up- per-crust New Yorker going back to her characters in Eyes Wide Shut and Birth. Romy struggles to balance the unwieldy duali- ties of her desire and her civilized exterior — the accomplished executive and matriarch, and the woman who, underneath it all, wants to give in, let loose, and release herself.
In other words, Reijn’s film not only earnestly contends with — and teasingly complicates — our ideas around sexuality, gender, and desire, but also our contemporary discourse around those very things. As Romy and Samuel haltingly ex- plore sexual fantasies, laying out then relishing in bending the rules and boundaries of their dalliance, the film confronts our culture’s great thorny shadow — power and sex — only to glee- fully flip it all on its back, upside down, and right side up again.
“That whole relationship between the two of them is just going: Who’s the cat? Who’s the mouse? Who’s using who? And you could also ask that about Romy and Jacob — who’s using who?” Reijn says, referencing Romy’s theater director hus- band. “Would he live in a house like that with his salary from the theater? I don’t think so. They’re all using each other because they’re all humans.”
The film becomes what Reijn calls a playground, an entertaining, sexy, and often dangerous-feeling experience in which we can consider the complexity of desire in a safe environ- ment. “It’s not a documentary,” Reijn says. “It’s all fake. We’re all buying a ticket, we’re all going to experience this together.
We can talk afterwards. I was very sure that it was needed, es- pecially moving to America, where sexual morals seem very suppressed. I wanted to explore that, but in a very human, warm way.”
That is perhaps most apparent in the film’s depiction of Romy and Samuel’s whirlwind affair, in which the forbidden fruit might very well be the source of their mutual attraction.
“This movie is absolutely a love story and absolutely full of passion and romance for me,” Reijn says of Romy and Samuel’s relationship. “I want the whole audience to fall in love with her, and I want the whole audience to fall in love with him and to be seduced by their love. To want them to be together even though you know it’s not the ‘right’ thing to want.”
Even as their affair is forbidden, it also provides a sanctu- ary of sorts in which their connection is true and beautiful, a hurricane of passion and real romance. It makes for, in a film structured and driven by lust and unspoken urges, scenes that can go from uncomfortable and funny (and from uncomfortably funny to actually funny), to passionate and sexy, to heartbreak- ing and cathartically tender, all in the span of a few thrilling, tightly staged minutes.
“Whatever we think about their relationship, within their safe room where they meet each other, they are very honest and they’re incredibly themselves in a raw, moving way,” Reijn says. “There’s a beauty in it despite the fact that they’re doing something that is forbidden. Within that, they are completely themselves and he has the capability to be incredibly warm and empathetic towards her and also towards his own needs and wants.”
A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern.
After Kidman had connected deeply with Reijn’s debut feature Instinct, the pair had met and began talking about a potential future project together.
When Reijn began writing the script for Babygirl, Kidman “was definitely in my mind,” Reijn notes. “I did think she would be one of the very few people who would bring the courage to a character like this. It’s not necessarily from the start a very likable character. She has a lot of layers. You have to be able to play all those different roles.”
That is, the roles that Romy presents as, and the ones she wants to tamp down. The complexity of her role, and the nakedness underneath when she is stripped of her masks, presented Kidman with what she describes as a bracingly new challenge.
“I’m always trying to find more inside me,” Kidman says of her approach to her career. “I just need someone to come along and say, I’m going to help bring that out of you.” She found it in Reijn from the start. “We talked for about an hour after I read the script, and we were just completely intertwined from that point on. It really has been the most unusual relationship to me.”
“She is so incredibly smart, and the chemistry between her and me was a dream,” Reijn says. “It was almost telepathic communication.” It was a kind of cosmic artistic alignment that was particularly crucial on a film that involved so much vulnerability. Kidman says frankly, “I wouldn’t have made it if it wasn’t with Halina.”
The same, she notes, can be said for her male counterparts in Dickinson and Banderas, “who were like, yes, we will come and be there with you and be your partners in this storytelling, but we’re not the center of the story. I love them for being there with all their openness. They were so generous to us.”
In Dickinson, Reijn, who had been immediately drawn to the actor after seeing him in Beach Rats and Triangle of Sadness, found a fluid embodiment of Samuel’s shifting, often competing dualities of confident masculinity and a tender, boyish sense of empathy.
“It looks almost like it’s improvised, but it’s not,” Reijn says. “It’s so hard to do because he can look in one shot like a 12-year-old little boy, and then in the next, he’s a man, a totally confident 45-year-old guy.”
When Reijn paired Dickinson up with Kidman over an initial Zoom call, she could immediately sense their ability to slot into the see-sawing power games of their characters.
“They were very vulnerable, sweet, but also having fun,” Reijn recalls. “I really just looked at them and listened to them and took a step back. There’s an insane amount of respect, but also playfulness between them. I could immediately see they would be each other’s equal.”
Dickinson, though, admits that he was intimidated by Kidman. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t,” he says. “She’s obviously a force of nature as a performer, as a person. Incredibly impressive and professional, but also really dictates the energy on set.”
The two, Reijn notes, “made a point that they didn’t want to get to know each other too well” before production began, perhaps helping to inspire the somewhat antagonistic distance between their characters in the film, particularly early on.
On set, though, Dickinson says, “we very quickly got comfort- able with each other. That was necessary for the dynamic that we have as characters. I think Samuel isn’t afraid of her and isn’t intimidated by her, so I had to really just be comfortable in her presence. But she made that very easy. She’s very calm, very cool.”
Kidman, though, speaks of the space of vulnerability that she entered with Dickinson and Banderas with a kind of rever- ence, a realm of performance that was inhabited rather than discussed. The experience of where they went, it seems, stays mostly between them. “That’s kind of like sacred territory, and I promised Harris, and I promised Antonio, that place of artistic sacredness, we hold it in that bubble — that’s where it exists,” Kidman says. “If that translates into the performances, fantastic. That’s where it stays, and that’s how it stays. But it doesn’t get dissected intel- lectually because it’s all too magical.”
While Dickinson tapped into the young, playfully goading other man, Banderas played Jacob, a theater director and the du- tiful, cuckolded husband, a role that, on paper, might seem diametrically opposed to the character he typically cuts: the dominant, dangerous men in his acclaimed films with Pedro Almodóvar, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Skin I Live In. Reijn wanted somebody who was not “shy or obviously intellectual” but rather someone who was particularly masculine, even as “it was not an obvious role for masculine men to play the husband of this very strong and powerful character.”
“It was very important to me that it is not his problem — it is her journey, it is her problem,” Reijn notes. “It’s not his masculinity. It’s not that he’s not able to be a dominant man in bed. I wanted him to be a very interesting, amazing man. I wanted their mar- riage to be good in essence.”
Banderas, in some ways the archetype for a kind of suave and sensitive masculinity, seemed perfect. “I thought he would never do it,” Rejin says. “I was so nervous to meet him and speak to him, but he immediately said yes.”
The actor gravitated immediately to the script, finding it “very courageous about desires that we all human beings have and not all of us have the courage to express that have to do with sexuality and a way to understand our own traumas.”
Playing the man pushed aside, Banderas, an icon of the screen, was particularly generous and helped set the tone on set in surrendering himself to the production.
“He was the hardest worker, open to any direction, incredibly playful and sweet, and made everybody feel safe,” Reijn says. “He made Nicole feel super seen and safe in the sex scenes that they had. He brought a vulnerability and a strength that I’m totally grateful for.”
Banderas, though, directs the praise onto Reijn and Kidman, the two women he credits for shepherding the film. “These two women are a dream — powerhouses,” he says. In particular, the film allowed him to finally work with Kidman, who he calls “one of the best actresses ever.”
Director/Writer/Producer Halina Reijn
Halina Reijn is a visionary filmmaker, producer, actress, and author known for her ability to craft subversive and provocative narratives that challenge conventions and push boundaries.
Reijn’s latest feature is the erotic thriller Babygirl, which she wrote, directed and pro- duced with with 2AM for A24. Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas star in the film which is making its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival before being released later this year. Previously, she directed A24’s Bodies Bodies Bodies starring Pete Davidson, Maria Bakalova, Amandla Stenberg, and Rachel Sen- nott. The film had its world premiere at SXSW and earned Reijn a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director. Reijn’s critically acclaimed directorial debut, Instinct, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019, followed by bows at TIFF, BFI London, and Les Arcs. Produced under Reijn’s Man Up banner, the film received a European Film Award nomination for Best Debut Film and was The Netherlands’ sub- mission to the Academy Awards for Best International Feature.
As an actress, Reijn most recently starred in, created and produced the television series Red Light, earning her the award for Best Actress at the Dutch Film Festival and the series a Dutch film award for Best TV Show. She also starred in the Oscar-nominat- ed film ZUS & ZO, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, which premiered at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, and in Valkyrie, opposite Tom Cruise. On stage, Reijn has been recog- nized for standout performances in leading roles in Hedda Gabler, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Human Voice, winning several awards for her performances.
