Finally arriving in cinemas, the gripping, complex (and sexy) Babygirl pairs Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in a secretive workplace affair. Director Halina Reijn goes into detail about the film with Steve Newall.
Babygirl
Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is about to hit cinemas in our part of the world, and we’ve already seen plenty of social media attention since US audiences encountered it late last month. The provocative pic stars Nicole Kidman as successful CEO Romy Mathis, who seemingly has it all—besides her career, she’s got a hot husband (Antonio Banderas), nice home(s), and a couple of good kids. But that’s not the makings of a gripping, complex, and sexy film like this one—instead, Romy puts this outwardly perfect life in jeopardy when she has an affair with young intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson).
It’s a premise we’ve seen before, but seldom does a sexual thriller open in such a bold, loud way, and then immediately upend what we think we’ve just witnessed. Heard before she’s seen, Kidman’s Romy is having a loud orgasm as the film starts. But this, as filmmaker Halina Reijn shares, proves to have been performative—next Babygirl is “immediately showing her having a real orgasm by herself. It’s intriguing, and it provokes a lot of questions”.
These are questions the Dutch actor-turned-filmmaker relishes taking the rest of Babygirl to answer, including examining a woman’s own relationship with her guilt about herself. “That’s what I suffer from,” Reijn says. “That’s why I had to make the movie. But it didn’t solve anything.”
Babygirl director Halina Reihn on set with Nicole Kidman
While Babygirl is Reijn’s third film as director (after 2019’s Instinct and 2022’s Bodies Bodies Bodies), her background as an actor of renown on stage and screen surfaces in various ways. It informs the opening scene, helping to define the film as a comedy of manners (though masturbating on the floor to very specific pornography may not usually be related to such things). And, as my partner picked up, in Reijn’s choice to make 19th century dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler—a title role Reijn’s herself performed—the play that Romy’s theatre director husband is staging in the film.
“I love that your partner unpacked my easter egg,” Reijn says, “Because almost nobody says that. In the beginning of the film Antonio Banderas, who is the theatre director who plays Nicole’s husband, he says to Nicole, in a scene, ‘my actress, who plays Hedda Gabler doesn’t understand Hedda Gabler at all. She thinks it’s about desire, but it is about suicide.'”
As Reijn explains, she’s saying to the audience: you think this movie is about sex, but this movie is about someone who wants to destroy her life and will be reborn.
“I played all these iconic roles in my life on stage,” Reijn says, “and I felt very trapped often in them because they were so limited for women. But then I played Hedda Gabler, and I felt completely free for the first time, because here’s a woman trapped in a marriage, and she’s so destructive. Instead of bettering herself, she starts to destroy everybody around her, and this was kind of the first time that I could really play this dark character, you know, and show other layers of myself as an actress.”
For Reijn, the story of Hedda Gabler—“a woman who thinks she’s trapped but who actually traps herself”—was inspiring for Babygirl. “It’s all about Romy, Nicole Kidman’s character. Antonio Banderas is very capable of dominating her, of being whatever she wants him to be, but Nicole/Romy is not asking for what she wants.”
It’s easy for men to centre themselves and draw the wrong conclusions from the film. One post online basically says “don’t be like Antonio Banderas”, even though the film isn’t really about his character. Men missing the point is something that Reijn elaborates on.
“A lot of my male friends were like, ‘Oh, wait, am I Antonio, or am I Harris?’” she says. “First of all, that question was asked in an intimate conversation around, ‘hey, just tell me, who do you think I am?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not about that.’” Playing with the expectations of the audience, Reijn has deliberately made the film about Romy, and the male characters side characters: “just like we as women have been doing for the last 100 years. You know, where our character was the ideal.”
Like women being portrayed as the ideal, Reijn describes Harris Dickinson’s character Samuel as a total fantasy. He’s sensitive and sweet and dominant and angry… he’s everything, she says, acknowledging it’s impossible to be like that. As for Romy’s husband Jacob: “It’s not about him not being able to give her an orgasm. It’s about her not being able to ask for what she wants—because she doesn’t love herself.”
This isn’t a movie against men, Reijn says: Babygirl wants to include men and also talk about masculinity in the present day—but it’s from a female perspective.
That’s a shift too, when considering a genre that comes to mind frequently during Babygirl—the 80s and 90s erotic thriller. In line with Reijn’s observations around centering a female character and subverting our expectations, this feels like a fresh perspective for a sexual thriller. Kidman finds herself in the sort of situations where, if it was the 90s, Michael Douglas might find these things ‘just happening to him’. It’s a genre that Reijn professes her love for, as well as the Michael Douglas archetype.
“I love it,” she says “Revisit it. I can recommend everyone to rewatch Disclosure. You have to watch it with a grain of salt, because it’s incredibly sexist, but it is very fun to watch. I really loved all of the movies because I always felt very lonely in my dark sexuality, and I thought as a woman that I wasn’t allowed to have masochistic fantasies, and I thought I was weak, and that was not feminist.”
“Then I saw 9½ Weeks, and I just felt less alone,” Reijn shares. ”I had, of course, read all the forbidden books, but to see it on a screen, and to actually see it be acted out like that…” Reijn also references Indecent Proposal and Fatal Attraction as dealing with kink and extreme sexual fantasies—but what she didn’t like about this sort of film was how in the last act the cheaters would get punished, or the femme fatale would be killed.
“It would just be boring to me, and I couldn’t relate anymore, and it would just always stop watching,” she says. Reijn wanted to recreate the genre in Babygirl, with the hope that what these films meant for her when she was 14 or 15, women will have that with her movie and feel less alone.
It’s a genre that doesn’t really exist anymore for a variety of reasons. Pornography has replaced a lot of titillation that we used to get from cinema, but those films gave couples permission to have a chat in the car after a film about some risqué subjects—Babygirl will prompt many such discussions of its own.
Not to issue a challenge, but Reijn tells me of a podcast she just listened to: “There’s four ladies, I think, around my age, and one of them said that they went to the movie and their husband didn’t want to go—they convinced him to go, and then they walked out after and they had sex in the parking lot. I was literally crying, that was just so dumb, but I felt so excited that they were inspired.”
Reijn describes her film as escapism and a sexy movie to watch, hopefully, but one where the audience can decide for themselves about the characters’ actions—and liberate themselves from judgement in the process. “As long as you do it in a safe environment and there’s consent, dress up as a giraffe, crawl around, eat an ice cream, whatever you want to do,” she says. “I just want everybody to celebrate their sexuality. So, yes, absolutely, that is what I hope my movie can do a little bit.”
As our conversation draws to a close, I share with Reijn how I remained seated as Sky Ferreira’s Leash played over the credits. Recorded for the film, it sounds incredible in the theatre. More than that, the very nature of Ferreira’s torturous relationship with her former record company and the theme of control that run through the film don’t feel like a coincidence.
Signed to Capitol in 2009, Ferreira’s debut album Night Time, My Time (a Laura Palmer line from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) was released in 2013—but in the decade since, little else, let alone Ferreira’s long-promised second album Masochism. The singer’s hinted at label sabotage and fans conducted a “Free Sky Ferreira” campaign, with Ferreira winning her freedom from her record label last year.
Reijn says that she’s always been super fascinated by Ferreira. Like me, she’s a big fan of her music, intrigued by Ferreira’s life and everything that was happening to her. Reijn recalls a phone call with Ferreira to to talk about her song for the film: “After five minutes, I was completely obsessed and in love with her, because I felt we had so many similarities in how we view the world.”
Control, surrender, and BDSM all came up in their conversation, as did Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, which Reijn says is both of their favourite movie. “I just felt this is perfect. And then when she sent me that song, I mean, I’m not an easy crier, it sounds like I’m very sentimental, but it was very moving to me. It just expressed everything that I wanted to bring to the surface, which is everything dark and the beast inside of me that I’m so embarrassed about, but that I wanted to let out.”
“She really helped me do that. And I’m just grateful for her song. And I’m grateful that she’s back, and I hope she stays with us, you know, and makes more music.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
