Babygirl

Halina Reijn

Katie Ross

Upon exiting our screening of Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” my friend exclaimed that I was on probation from selecting the movies for our next few theater outings. The consensus amongst my friends (who are not cinephiles) was that the film was “too weird,” and that Antonio Banderas (who plays Jacob, the husband of Romy,  an automation executive (Nicole Kidman) was simply too sexy for Romy to feel dissatisfied in the bedroom. I am biased to agree with the latter statement, though I left the theater with a less impassioned sentiment. For all its campy eroticism—Romy licking milk out of a bowl as though she were performing cunnilingus not the least among them—“Babygirl” left me feeling, for lack of a better word, rather dry. 

The erotic thriller centers on Romy’s affair with her much younger intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), whom she becomes fascinated with while watching him quiet an angry dog with a cookie. Their relationship takes on a similar pavlovian tone through Samuel’s conditioning of Romy’s desires—while ridiculous, it’s the film at its most entertaining. My main issue lies in the so-called stakes of their relationship: Samuel’s position as an intern gives him absolute authority over Romy—“one phone call to HR and she’d lose everything.” Maybe it’s just me, but the intervention of human resources is not enough to sustain the illicit thrill that fuels the erotic thriller genre. 

While the lack of dramatic tension leaves the relationship at the center of the film lifeless, a more thought-provoking relationship can be found in the film’s subtext;, that between automation and desire. Samuel recognizes Romy’s erotic dissatisfaction and optimizes her desire to be produced by a single command. Though the intersection of robotics and sexuality is interesting, the less-than-thrilling eroticism in “Babygirl” is just… barking up the wrong tree.