"Babygirl" in One Sentence
How to harness the eroticism of thrillingly high stakes
We first meet Romy Mathis — Nicole Kidman’s starring character Halina Reijn’s new film Babygirl, released in the US on December 25, 2024 by A24 — as a middle-aged woman having lackluster sex with her salt-and-pepper-haired husband Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas. She pretends to climax at the same time he does, then sneaks off to watch porn and finish for real.
Her choice of video points us toward what she’s really craving: “How does daddy use you?” a man whispers. “Any way he pleases,” a woman replies.
We soon learn that in the rest of her life, Romy is very, very dominant. She is the founder-CEO of a highly successful, Amazon-like automated shipping company called Tensile, and a devoted mother of two teenagers. She has achieved, it seems, everything in life except an orgasm with her husband of decades, who happens to be a tender, philosophically-inclined theatre director. And if he’s not going to dominate her in the way she wants, who else even stands a chance of being able to?
Enter the new intern. Romy first encounters him on the city street outside her company’s offices, where a barking, wild-eyed dog is menacing pedestrians and no one else can control it. Before the dog can bite Romy, the young man — played by Harris Dickinson — succeeds where all others have failed, offering the dog what we’ll soon learn is a cookie and managing to calm it down and get it to obey him.
The metaphor is clear enough. We can imagine that even the dog prefers when someone competent takes charge of it, compared to when it is running frenzied and wild on its own, and Romy just wants to be handled like that dog. Is that too much to ask?
But why does it have to be an intern — someone supposedly at the far opposite end of a power dynamic from the founder-CEO of a dominant global corporation — who steps in to take charge of Romy?
Join me behind the paywall to explore how creator Halina Reijn baked the answer right into this story’s core emotional structure and how the film likely couldn’t have worked any other way.
The Emotional Superstructure of Babygirl
A founder-CEO who has achieved everything except orgasm with her husband must risk it all to submit to her most dominant intern and liberate herself from dated ideas of sexuality.
How to Harness the Eroticism of Thrillingly High Stakes
This story has all the makings of a Greek tragedy: a power matchup between a local king (or, in this case, a highly successful woman founder-CEO) and someone who could easily read as a “god incognito” (a fresh intern), coming in to demonstrate that, despite their lowly rank in the social order, their powers are ultimately superior and can bring the king’s whole “house” (company, marriage, and family) crashing down in ruin.