There is a peculiar, perennial tension embedded in the architecture of the modern workplace; an undercurrent that hums beneath the fluorescent lights and quarterly reports. Spend enough time confined to glass-walled offices and open-concept battlefields, and the boundary between professional camaraderie and intimate entanglement begins to blur. This is not news. But what is interesting is how cinema continues to mine that fraught terrain, especially when it intersects with questions of gender, status, and desire.
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, a slick and sumptuous new erotic drama, dives headfirst into this fertile ambiguity. At its center is Romy Mathis, a tech CEO played by Nicole Kidman with the kind of commanding poise and low-burning intensity that reminds us why she remains one of the most daring actors working today. Romy is, by all accounts, a woman who has it all: a devoted husband (Antonio Banderas, warm and wounded), two bright daughters, real estate that gleams like a design catalog, and a formidable intellect sharpened by years of strategic ascent.
But as it often goes in stories of power and repression, what she has is not what she wants.
Her husband, though attentive, lacks the carnal instinct to satisfy her increasingly specific tastes; a dissatisfaction she articulates with clinical clarity, only to be met with hesitance and mild horror. Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern with a swimmer’s build and a sensitive eye, who registers Romy’s yearning with a mixture of curiosity and opportunism. Their flirtation escalates into an affair that is less about romance and more about release; a charged exploration of dominance, submission, and the unspoken rules that govern both sex and Silicon Valley.
Reijn, a Dutch actress turned director, brings a keen observational eye to this terrain. Her previous film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, skewered Gen Z narcissism with biting wit. Here, she trades satire for eroticism, but retains her fascination with performativity and power. If Babygirl echoes the contours of Secretary (2002), that’s no accident. Both films use the boss-employee dynamic as a lens through which to explore sexual agency, though Babygirl inverts the gender roles and tilts the playing field toward fantasy.
Still, this isn’t merely a film about kink; it’s about consequence. And in that regard, Reijn is less interested in tidy moralism than in the chaotic fallout of desire. Kidman plays Romy with a riveting duality: a woman who understands risk management but finds herself seduced by the very danger she’s built a career avoiding. It’s a performance that calls back to her turn in Eyes Wide Shut; all guarded longing and fractured elegance; as well as the chilly detachment of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. One senses that this material is more than just a role for her; it’s a thematic through-line, a continued excavation of what lurks beneath the skin of controlled femininity.
If the film falters, it does so in its conclusion, where Romy attempts to domesticate her urges through a curious arrangement with her husband; one that monetizes her desires in a way that feels too calculated, even for a woman of her shrewdness. The implication seems to be that liberation can be brokered through capital, but the execution feels strangely facile, as though the script ran out of nerve at the very moment it needed to go for the jugular.
There are other missteps, too. A subplot involving Romy’s assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), who leverages her boss’s secret for personal gain, gestures toward a commentary on feminine rivalry in corporate spaces; but lands more as a narrative detour than a revelation. If Reijn intended this as a critique of toxic ambition, it’s too undercooked to resonate. What does resonate, however, is Dickinson’s performance as the eager yet volatile intern. He oscillates between tender subordination and petulant control with unnerving ease. But it is Banderas, as the betrayed husband, who anchors the film’s emotional reality. His Jacob is neither a caricature nor a victim, but a man painfully aware of the chasm between intimacy and understanding.
Babygirl is not without its flaws, but it succeeds in provoking the kind of uncomfortable questions that linger long after the credits roll. What does it mean to transgress when you already hold the power? And is sexual freedom just another commodity in the executive suite? In the end, Reijn offers no neat answers; only the suggestion that desire, like leadership, is a performance. And sometimes the cost of admission is simply too high.
