"Babygirl" opens the way many Nicole Kidman movies seem to want to: in media orgasm. Her character, Romy Mathis, the hard-charging CEO of a robotics company, has just finished having sex with her adoring husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), who coos "I love you" in her ear before promptly falling asleep. Whereupon Romy rushes to her home office, dials up some violent porn and really gets herself off.
One response to this, I suppose, is happy holidays, moviegoers of America. But "Babygirl" has more going on than mere titillation, a rehash of "Eyes Wide Shut" or the heavy breathing of an '80s erotic thriller, which it superficially resembles. Beneath the skin of Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn's nervy drama is the spectacle of two lonely people negotiating the rules of their private arena of domination, humiliation and acceptance. And one of those people isn't Romy's husband.
It's been a while since we've had a good S&M romance, with 2002's "Secretary" being perhaps the pinnacle of this particular subgenre. As in that film, a heroine meets a man who helps her find her inner goddess by subjugating her, or at least by playacting subjugation as close to the edge as the couple dares get. The difference in "Babygirl" is that it's the woman who has all the external accoutrements of power: wealth, awestruck employees, the respect of a male-dominated business world. Romy's younger daughter (Vaughan Reilly) worships her, and her more rebellious older teen (Esther McGregor, Ewan's daughter) secretly does, too.
Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson, the male model/boytoy in "Triangle of Sadness"), one of the new crew of company interns and a rangy 20-something whom Romy first spies on the street subduing a wild runaway German shepherd. "How'd you get that dog to calm down?" she asks him later in the break room. "I had cookies in my pocket," he responds. "Do you want one?" It's lust at first sight, with Romy hungering for the leash.
Takes a while to get there, though, and the more interesting drama of "Babygirl" is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other. Some of this is talk: "What we do, it's normal, as long as it's consensual," Samuel insists in what amounts to a motto for kink couples everywhere. Much of it is wordless, the young man tentatively but firmly pushing the boundaries of Romy's armor, sensing the intensely vulnerable woman within.
He shows up at her house, ostensibly to deliver documents. (The daughters just love him; Jacob, too.) He has a glass of milk sent to her table at a bar during an after-hours office get-together; she drinks it while staring him down. Push comes to scary but erotic shove in a dimly lit hotel room where Romy ... I'll stop there. This is a family newspaper.
In her roles and in her public persona, Kidman has carved a career-long niche for herself as a forceful and intelligent woman exploring the border zones of sex, subversion and transgression, and she's always seemed willing to push the envelope further (and risk the accompanying ridicule) than her peers. "Babygirl" is more of the same, if ultimately a little less; the teacups in Romy's well-ordered life are rattled and then some, but they never quite break. (If you want a genuinely transgressive take on a forbidden affair between an older woman and a younger man, try Catherine Breillat's 2023 film "Last Summer," currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and for rent on Amazon and Apple TV.)
Reijn, who playfully deconstructed the slasher movie in the 2022 horror comedy "Bodies Bodies Bodies," is more interested in the shared space of tender cruelty (or vice versa) that Romy and Samuel construct for themselves and each other. If Dickinson ably conveys a young man's daring and uncertainty, Kidman dives into Romy's white-hot core of hidden shame, everything the armor has been constructed to conceal, and the unbridled release that comes with finally being shed of it. The final scenes of "Babygirl" just tidy up after the explosion, implying that the character's two sides have been resolved. Deep down, she knows and we know, she's still hungry for the leash.
R. In area theaters. Strong sexual content, nudity and language. 114 minutes.