Of course, more is going on in Reijn’s slippery production than mere ideology-pushing. Yet what ideologies are here ought not to be elided too quickly. From its first panting moments, Babygirl is a film about sex: who has it, in what form, and, crucially, with what shifting power dynamics. What Romy wants is a man who will dominate her, not quite in the style of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) but to a greater extent than her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), is willing. What she gets instead is a lesson in making the best of what one has. Even a bazillionaire, the picture clearly implies, must sacrifice something to make it all work. If Reijn’s goal was to bring female sexual desire under political discipline, she could hardly have made a more instructive movie.

One might expect a certain joylessness to attend all of this teaching. Happily, Reijn is too skilled a director to admit a boring scene. When viewers first meet Samuel, he is mastering an unruly dog outside of Romy’s office building, a metaphor that would be barking mad were the film less sure of itself. Later, having taken his boss’s measure, he orders Romy a glass of milk and watches haughtily as she drinks it down. When, during an eventual confrontation, Jacob remarks that “female masochism is a male fantasy,” Samuel corrects him with all the assurance of a gender studies star: “That’s a dated idea of sexuality.” Yet even that barb is half ironic rather than doctrinaire. Caught red-handed, Romy’s lover can’t help smirking at his own impudent élan. 

A co-star of 2023’s striking miniseries A Murder at the End of the World (Hulu), Dickinson is as intriguing a leading man as Hollywood has produced in recent years. Lanky, 28 years old, and unconventionally handsome, the English actor is unlikely to be cast as James Bond anytime soon but could easily fill the niche once occupied by Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy. He is, in other words, interesting to watch. Here, as Kidman’s improbable paramour, the young man summons a self-regard that thrills precisely because it feels innate rather than earned. To watch his character among the other interns is like seeing Tom Cruise on jury duty. 

As for Kidman, much has been made of late of her age, surgical enhancements, and omnipresence onscreen. None of that matters. Biting into her role with fearsome commitment, the actress captures both Romy’s self-possession and her desperation to abandon herself completely. Note, for example, her pleased, exasperated gasp when Samuel calls her a “good girl.” No one — not Julianne Moore, not Amy Adams, not Cate Blanchett — could have played the tension more perfectly. 

Indeed, unease with previously accepted notions of decorum is a great deal of what Babygirl is about once one pulls back the curtain of its gender politics. Peppering Reijn’s screenplay are numerous acknowledgments that the movie takes place in a peak-woke workplace in which old-fashioned morality has long since given way to bureaucratized standards of power and consent. The production’s cleverness lies in its awareness that the contemporary HR handbook is no less inhibiting than the Old Testament. The frisson Romy desires is sexual, yes, but it is also professional. How could it be otherwise? Even those who celebrate the new commandments secretly yearn to break them. 

How the film plays with this revelation is a major part of its appeal, lending sparks to conversations that might otherwise merely caricature eroticism: 

ROMY: “You’re very young. I don’t want to hurt you.”

SAMUEL: “Hurt me? I think I have power over you, not the other way around. I mean, one call and you lose everything, right? [Pause.] Does that turn you on, when I say that?” 

This is good writing. More than that, it is sexy, to the extent that humor, surprise, and danger can produce that condition. The old taboos having crumbled, Reijn’s characters have no choice but to tiptoe past new ones. One can’t be a bad boy or girl if “badness” is defunct as a category. Thus do corporate regulations become the stuff of forbidden love. Something has to fill the space that traditional dogmas once occupied. 

Though the affair can’t last, Babygirl declines to destroy its protagonists. That doesn’t mean, however, that the movie has no villains. Shadowing Romy for much of the film is Esme (Sophie Wilde), an eager assistant who sniffs out the liaison and uses it to her own advantage. When, in a chilling scene, the young woman confronts her boss, she pledges not to hurt Romy but to remake her “as a version of you that I can look up to and respect.” Maoist doctrine, meet 21st-century anti-woke corporate romance. Had Esme sent our heroine to work on a collective farm, I wouldn’t have blinked. 

But perhaps I have the entire movie wrong. Left unexplored for most of Babygirl’s run is the fact that Kidman’s character operates a robotics firm, a detail that occasions typically nightmarish shots of robots seizing American jobs. Could Reijn’s picture have been, all along, a humanistic reply to those who cheer our species’s creeping irrelevance? People are messy, ungovernable, and endlessly disappointing, such a “reading” of the film would go. We are also interesting, creative, flexible, and dynamic. Best of all, we know how to take chances. Automate that. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.