Babygirl (2024)

Halina Reijn's Babygirl tracks Romy, a chief executive at a New York automation firm, her quiet marriage to a theater director, and an intern named Samuel whose haircut suggests he dressed in the dark. The film examines a woman's appetites with the cool detachment of a laboratory technician. The camera watches. Romy squirms, submits, and slowly learns what her body has wanted for twenty-five years. This is a picture about the female orgasm gap, delivered as drama instead of pamphlet.

The film is directed by a woman and built expressly around female sexual agency. Reijn has spoken of normalizing the older woman with the younger man, a reversal of the usual arithmetic, and the screenplay commits to that inversion without apology. A debate scene has characters trading theories about female masochism, and Romy's confession that she has never climaxed with her husband lands with real weight. The corporate backdrop offers a faint gesture toward workplace hierarchy. It has no interest in eating anyone rich. It wants to watch one woman eat, so to speak, and it does.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. No queer current. No climate anxiety. No racial reckoning, no neurodivergent subplot. The supporting minority players appear and simply exist, which is its own quiet achievement. The body is foregrounded as a site of pleasure, not of size acceptance, so the affirmation stays narrow. The result is a sleek, single-minded erotic thriller that treats its subject with the gravity of a dissertation and the budget of a perfume advertisement. Kidman commits fully. The film around her is precise, chilly, and a little pleased with itself. It is not a lecture. It is a demonstration, and the demonstration is the point.