Babygirl (2024)
There is a particular kind of film that seems designed less to entertain than to make you shift uneasily in your seat, and Babygirl (2024) belongs firmly in that category. Written and directed by Halina Reijn, it is an erotic thriller centred on Romy, a high-powered tech CEO whose professional composure masks a private life that is rather less sorted than her corner office would suggest. When a charismatic young intern enters her orbit, the careful architecture of her marriage, her career, and her sense of self begins to crack. The film arrives in a tradition of psychosexual drama that stretches back through the 1980s and 1990s, a genre that Hollywood more or less abandoned after it curdled into self-parody, and Reijn is quite openly trying to rehabilitate it for a modern audience, asking whether desire and power can coexist without one consuming the other.
Reijn is a Dutch theatre director who made her English-language feature debut with Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), a sharp, A24-backed horror-comedy that announced her as someone with a genuine instinct for tension and a sardonic eye for class dynamics (not entirely unlike what Ruben Östlund was doing around the same time in Triangle of Sadness). Babygirl is a step up in ambition, produced through A24 alongside Dutch company 2AM and Man Up Film, and it is an original screenplay rather than an adaptation, which gives Reijn considerable freedom to follow the material wherever it leads. The budget has not been officially confirmed, though the film carries the polished but unremarkable visual grammar of a mid-range prestige production: clean, corporate interiors that double as a kind of emotional cage for its protagonist.
The casting is where Babygirl earns genuine attention. Nicole Kidman, no stranger to psychologically demanding roles (her work in The Others remains a masterclass in sustained unease), takes on Romy with the kind of controlled intensity that only an actor entirely comfortable in their own craft can manage. Opposite her, Harris Dickinson, whose stock has risen considerably through films like Triangle of Sadness and Where the Crawdads Sing, plays the intern with a studied, watchful quality that keeps the audience perpetually off balance. Antonio Banderas, an actor who has demonstrated real range across his career from early Almodóvar work (well worth a look at Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown for context on where he came from) through to Hollywood action and beyond, takes the husband role, a part that could easily be thankless but which proves to be anything but. Sophie Wilde and Esther-Rose McGregor round out the principal ensemble in supporting turns that add texture to the margins of the story.
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024) is arguably one of the most uncomfortable films I’ve ever had the pleasure of squirming through. It’s an unapologetic erotic thriller that drops us into the high-pressure world of Romy, a super-successful female CEO played by Nicole Kidman. She’s stuck in what can only be described as a rather unsatisfying, vanilla relationship with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Enter Harris Dickinson as the young, dangerously charming intern who suddenly opens her up to a whole new world of kinks, BDSM, and psychological submission.
It’s a premise that immediately grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go, setting the stage for a deeply unsettling exploration of power and desire.
What makes the film work, despite its deeply cringe-inducing moments, is the sheer commitment of the cast and the director's clear vision. Harris Dickinson does a genuinely brilliant job portraying a character who is, beneath the surface, absolutely horrible, controlling, and manipulative. You can tell from the moment he starts pulling the strings that this entire arrangement is inevitably going to blow up in Romy’s face. The narrative is entirely predictable in its downward trajectory, but that’s exactly the point. It plays out like proper car crash cinema; you know exactly how badly it’s going to end, but you simply can’t look away from the wreckage. Reijn clearly knows what she’s trying to achieve here, and she succeeds in making you feel every bit of Romy’s intoxicating, toxic descent.
It’s not without its glaring flaws, mind you. The runtime is needlessly long, and there’s a so-called "fight scene" towards the climax that is so laughably bad it nearly broke the tension entirely. However, just when you think the film has lost the plot, Antonio Banderas absolutely steals the show in the final act, bringing a much-needed grounding and emotional gravity to the chaos.
I can’t say I thoroughly "enjoyed" the experience in the traditional sense, given how deeply awkward it all is, but I have to respect the ambition.
Babygirl is a messy, deeply uncomfortable, yet undeniably compelling piece of cinema that takes some massive swings. It might not stick the landing perfectly, but fair play to Reijn and her cast for having the guts to swing at all.
Babygirl will not be for everyone, and its mixed bag of formal ambition and narrative messiness means it sits in that awkward middle ground where admirers and detractors will talk past each other entirely. What it does do is confirm Reijn as a director willing to court discomfort rather than smooth it away, and it gives Kidman a showcase role that is unlikely to fade quickly from memory. For viewers who enjoy films that use genre conventions as a kind of pressure cooker, there is real value here, even when the seams show. A24 continues to fund work that other studios would hesitate over, which is either a mark of genuine artistic courage or very good marketing, and with Babygirl it is probably a bit of both. Flawed, yes. Forgettable, no.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-06-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Babygirl (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video
Rent: Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: YouTube TV · HBO Max
Rent: Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube · Fandango At Home
Buy: Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
