The problem with writing a review of Babygirl is that everybody’s doin’ it. The internet is rife, molding over, with critical ones. The rare praises of the film are pretty surface level: Variety, for example, named the movie one of their “Editors’ Picks” for being “fearless and erotic”. Cultured simply said that it is “unflinching”. Vulture of the New York magazine captures best the one-dimensionality of its acclaim by calling the movie “straightforwardly sexy”. I can’t argue. 

Babygirl: sexy, yet unfortunately straightforward. Is that what Halina Reijn was going for?

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From the video campaigns on Instagram, and the promotional train station flyers, I thought I knew what I was getting into with the film. I was right: gitzy, garish, gauche. I’ve seen Turkish soap operas with more narrative intricacy. As for the sex – it was your mother’s BDSM. I wouldn’t call Babygirl family-friendly, but it was nothing to write home about. That is, if one feels the need to write home about seeing a fantastic erotic thriller. 

I waited for Babygirl to surprise me, to subvert my expectations, to do something exciting, have me lean forward a little in my seat, have me set down my popcorn, but no cigar. 

In my hometown theater, the options were either Babygirl or Sonic 3. I saw it in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of January, in a middle-of-nowhere town. I’d spent a decade doing dance recitals and elementary school plays on that little hardwood stage, in front of those blue plush foldable seats. The same screen where I’d watched Inside Out with my family. It only seemed like the natural progression of things, in a place so haunted with the nostalgic ghosts of my childhood, to go see Babygirl. 

The movie left me feeling, well, not much. For a two-hour film that talks and talks about women, it said surprisingly little about them. In fact, it said surprisingly little about anything. While the movie showed off some impressive actors, there is little else for me to list in the obligatory “good stuff” section of my review. It tries very hard to be many things —  erotic, scandalous, taboo, harrowing, but does all of them in a sort of Five-Below way, leaving me wondering, what was this trying to rip off? 

It had a lot of ends that were dropped loose and forgotten, involving characters that were difficult to root for. I love to defend a woman’s morally questionable actions — like Pearl in Ti West’s X, to bring up the obvious, but Romy just wasn’t likable or interesting enough to be worth defending. 

The film relied so heavily on the erotic appeal of Kidman’s nudity, Dickinson’s jaw and six pack, and the shock factor of pet play – and, I guess, milk – that it hoped audiences would forget about things like themes and messages. 

The good parts of the movie were: Harris Dickinson, who I recognized immediately as the Balenciaga guy in Triangle of Sadness, with his brooding sexy-suidical eyes and long face and neck combo; it’s hard not to be attracted to him. Nicole Kidman, stunning as usual, blond in some lights, ginger in others, gave a gorgeous and grating performance for this film. She received acclaim for creating sexual content that older middle-aged women could see themselves represented in. I watched her often wishing she was worse at acting so that I could be less uncomfortable — I winced through the whole excruciatingly lengthy scene where she lays on the hotel carpet and produces the weirdest sex noises in all of cinematic history, probably. Yet Antonio Banderas, playing Romy’s husband, Jacob, who the New York Times called “uxurious,” should have been my favorite character in the film. When Romy, Kidman’s character, confesses her extramarital affair to him, he goes on a beautiful tirade in which he delivers the quote that will be the thesis and title of my review: “I don’t give a fuck about your pathetic banal sex fantasies.” 

Unfortunately for Jacob, I just can’t forgive him for forgiving her at the end. The lack of any real personal, social, or professional accountability for Romy’s overtly damaging actions at the end of the movie infuriated me. I wanted to shout at Jacob through the screen to take his dignity and go!

Meanwhile, Romy’s assistant, Esme, seemingly the only woman with a head on her shoulders, gets her promotion and uses her newfound power to encourage the company to hire more women — feels like the true heroine, despite her minimal screen time. 

*

The movie opens with Romy and her husband having sex, when she fakes it and hurries off to masturbate to generic pornography on her laptop on the floor of her closet. The sexual dissatisfaction in the relationship is exposed right away, without giving us a second to orient ourselves. The opening scene places good/bad sex at the forefront, and the film refuses to look away from it for a second. 

The audience then finds out that Romy is a very successful CEO of a vague robot company, and also grew up in a cult. I hate to say it, but there are Wattpad stories written by 14 year olds on the internet with more complex character-building, and more cohesive background stories. Clearly, Romy is an icy, robotic character, and her job reflects it. Why would a character need to be complex? Not to mention the cult thing, which was so unfinished that I wonder if the writers had a big random-traits wheel that they spun at the last second, and it landed on cult trauma. 

The cult is only really mentioned a few times, and Romy is shown going to therapy for it, but the piece doesn’t make that much of an effect in the grand scheme of the film. It could have been fleshed out or completely removed, but its ultimately vague and random placement in the film feels like an afterthought.

Taking the cult stuff into consideration, I wonder whether the film is trying to say that women in power like to be dominated in the bedroom or whether traumatized people are kinky. Neither trope breaks new ground. In fact, these stereotypes that Babygirl relies on for its storyline are tired and, to me, pretty ridiculous. 

The narrative moves quickly, from Romy seeing her future inter(n)(est), Dickinson’s character Samuel, taming a dog on the street, which seems to get her going, to their first few sexual interactions. His behavior right off the bat is definitely HR-reportable, but she’s into it, so it’s ok. In their first one-on-one meeting, he sits across from her on one of those corporate white tables, in a room that is distinctly soundproof. In an attempt to heat things up, Samuel says to Romy,

“I think you like being told what to do.” 

I think this line would really find a much happier home on Wattpad or another fan-fiction forum. Recently, I rewatched the film with two friends to expose them to the wonders of Babygirl. One of them suggested the writers should have spent a little more time on the aforementioned site—which contains multitudes of explicit sexual content exploring every kink under the sun, from Supernatural brotherly love to dead doves, to One Direction y/n masterpieces, before writing this film—to get some perspective. 

It’s not that BDSM is a bad basis for storytelling, but Babygirl was coffee-table BDSM — something for the middle-aged to gasp at. Reijn’s audience is weirdly narrow; even as I rewatched it I couldn’t quite figure out who she was catering to. The downright ridiculousness of Kidman drinking an entire glass of milk while making sensual eye contact with Dickinson, and later lapping it up from a saucer on the floor like a cat, made it seem like the filmmakers saw BDSM as less of a fascinating fetish and more of a great big joke. 

Romy’s unfulfilled sexual needs, wherever they come from, are a legitimate conflict. A woman’s sexual dissatisfaction in her marriage has been a trope since Aphrodite and Hephaestus, and more recently, Tolstoy’s unhappy families. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening follows a woman’s summer fling — the real beginning of women’s sexual liberation, along with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover etc. etc. I figure Babygirl was trying to be Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train, or something similarly disorienting and dangerously adulterous, but it just stumbles short of compelling. Watching Chen Kaige’s Killing Me Softly, a psychological BDSM thriller, for example, made my stomach hurt. No, it doesn’t have the best critical reception— Killing Me Softly’s writing is notoriously bad–but it achieves a perfect balance of sexy and scary. In the scene where Joseph Finnes takes Heather Graham out to the cabin in the woods and ties her up with these long pink ribbons, you can’t tell if it’s hot or horrifying. I think Babygirl was trying to accomplish the same off-putting, intense thrilling effect, without Chen’s thriller aspects, but it just falls short, even in the erotic capacity. The fundamental basis of BDSM is that it’s exciting and thrilling—it challenges the norm. It’s difficult to take a film trying to encompass a BDSM relationship seriously when the film is barely interesting… 

The film pretends to be revolutionizing the married-women-cheating genre, but fails to match up to its predecessors. Edna in The Awakening feels suffocated by a boring husband and screaming children, because her life does not allow her to pursue anything else — and sure, women are still oppressed in many ways, but Romy’s desire for sexual liberation doesn’t exactly feel stifled, but banal, and almost antifeminist, to me. As Jacob, her husband, himself puts it, “female masochism is a male fantasy.” And then he has a panic attack, doesn’t explain, and no one talks about it again. What a wonderful way to introduce gender and sexual politics, and then kick it under the couch where nobody can reach it ever again. 

I don’t necessarily think women desiring sexual domination is inherently anti-feminist, though I would have been interested in a discussion of what that means to Jacob and Romy, in the context of the film and modern sexuality. However, the way that Romy, supposedly a powerful professional, handles herself in her work, not taking her work seriously, blowing off important meetings and moments with her family in order to fantasize about Samuel, makes her not seem misunderstood, but awful. 

Romy is aware of her needs, doesn’t tell her husband about them, has an affair, only to ruin her own life, her family, and drive Samuel to leave for Tokyo. At the end of the film, Romy’s husband finally does the very simple thing she wanted from him in bed, while she fantasizes about the intern petting the dog which overtly represents her desire to be owned and taken care of. The symbolism would only be more obvious if it was reaching through the screen and hitting the audience over the heads — and it gets pretty close to that point.

* 

Only after watching Babygirl did I realize that this was a film people were actually looking forward to. The New York Times did several pieces on the film’s implications to the culture of women’s sexuality. Reddit had many things to say about it, and some of them were actually positive. I read a few women’s blogs online talking about how much they had been anticipating the film, and went to see it on Christmas day, when it went to theatres. 

At the end of the day, all this film represents to me the new trend of porn for women. It started on Tiktok, with millennial and younger women overwhelmingly taking up reading “spicy” books that contained explicit sexual material. These seem to be the only books that certain women on the internet read at all. In response to the trend, publishers are churning out bodice-ripping fantasies, rather than tending to any real romances, or other genres of work. Into cowboys? Take your pick. Into the estranged prodigal son of the mafia boss coming back to take his on the family business? Into things that started off as Twilight fan-fiction and then got paper-published with the names changed? Take your pick, there’s a bunch of different shades of them. 

Babygirl feels to me like Hollywood dipping its toes into the trending pool of erotica for women — not that the genre is new, but in a sense, trying to re-accomplish what Fifty Shades of Grey did in 2015. Partly, I think this may be because the porn industry has been profiting from men for decades, and while men are still consuming pornography at significantly higher rates than women, the industry asks itself how to make money from the ladies, too.

A culture of cheap erotica as entertainment may not be new. But young people are having less sex than ever, and with technology creating sexual and emotional barriers and dating apps encouraging meaningless one-offs, the world is searching for fulfilling emotional connections now, more than ever. There is money to be made from content like Babygirl, but little else to gain. Of course, erotic and adulterous media has permeated classical literature for a long time — but in the context of women’s oppression, these pieces were empowering. Today’s media for sexually oppressed women certainly has a part to play, but must follow a delicate balance. Pieces that explore taboo sexual topics, women seeking out sexual fulfillment and liberation are welcomed. Surface-level misogynistic plotless erotica belongs on certain websites, not the big-screen. Just because the content exists in heaps for men, does not mean women need to stoop down to that level of self-loathing. 

Vulture, in their glowing review, called this movie a “self-love story.” I could not disagree more. Positive Redditors (which feels oxymoronic to say) felt that “the protagonist confront[s] their own struggles and ultimately choose[s] acceptance over shame.” It’s clear to me that these takes are based on one of Romy’s final lines, where she says to an arrogant male coworker “if I want to be humiliated, I’ll pay someone to do it.” But this girlboss-y little quip isn’t necessarily enough to convince me that Romy doesn’t absolutely still hate her own guts. 

Babygirl tries to tap into what made Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag so successful: women feeling like bad people, especially in sex and love. Fleabag, traumatized from her best friend’s death, is a force to be reckoned with in sexual relationships; she’s a pervert. But Waller-Bridge characterizes her sexual deviance in a charming, refreshing way, where audiences can relate to the feelings of the character even if they can’t relate to her actions. In a scene where she lies in bed with her boyfriend at the time, Henry, she is pictured masturbating to a clip of Barack Obama, because she didn’t finish during intercourse. But the difference is, Fleabag is charming, clearly hurt, and unable to cope. She hurts the people she loves, but she does love them, and tries to make things better in her own way. You can see her as a caring person, from every angle. Her sexual problems do not consume her entire life, as much as she may think they do. 

Quite frankly, if the writers of Babygirl wanted to make Romy more excusable, they should have made her a little more likeable…Fleabag tackles the intricacies of real, modern relationships, unfulfilling sex, fulfilling sex, bad sex, good sex, and all the differences. It discusses how women can feel disgusting, horrible, and scummy for having unconventional sexual desires, and there they come from. And in the end of it all, Fleabag is beautiful, emotional, raw, and real. The sex in Fleabag is intentionally paced and placed around moments of plot significance. The sex in Babygirl is consumerist spectacle, and just not all that consuming or spectacular. Fleabag resolves her sexual problems, somewhat, by reconciling with herself, closing with one of the most stunning scenes in all of contemporary filmmaking. 

In Babygirl, Romy spends a moment telling her husband how she wants to be normal, she wants to be a good person, but she can’t. She was born bad. Self-loathing, too, was the star of the show in Fleabag, but unfortunately, the TV show one-upped Babygirl on account of its good writing and existent plot. Women loathing themselves is not a bad place to start, but it’s a bad place to end. Romy doesn’t mend her bridges with the people she hurt, she doesn’t get any accountability for her destructive behavior, and she doesn’t move on. In the very last scene, where she once again sleeps with her husband, she thinks of Samuel the whole time. It doesn’t resolve itself, and Romy doesn’t get any better, because at the end of the day, Babygirl justdoesn’t like women. The men in Babygirl don’t like women. The women in Babygirl don’t like women. The women in Babygirl don’t like themselves. And you, watching Babygirl, don’t like women either.