Nicole Kidman drinks milk off the ground like the animal she is in the kinky but generally unappealing Babygirl, a movie that markets itself as sexy but is generally just not all that entertaining or alluring.
A few years ago I was introduced to the term “kink shaming” after I made a joke on Facebook in response to a guy I know opening up about pegging. The joke was funny, I don’t take issue with what that guy does in his spare time, but was called out (not by him) since my joke “shamed his kink.”
If we can’t joke about weird sexual habits, what can we joke about? Also, progressive liberals have no humor (I’m liberal). But I digress…
Babygirl, which I thought would be an erotic thriller about a female CEO who starts an affair with a male intern, isn’t very erotic—unless you are into the sexual shit put on screen here, which you may be but I certainly am not—and certainly no thriller. It’s a drama that in hindsight I’m not entirely sure has a point or purpose, other than to put beautiful Nicole Kidman into naughty but largely nudeless situations. And positions.
Kidman is great, bringing the feminine ferocity you’d expect from the actor in a role such as this. Her micro expressions dance circles around the material; she is operating at an entirely different level as everything else contained within Babygirl.
She and costar Harris Dickinson have no chemistry, however, or at least the chemistry that would explain how a CEO would so quickly make the stupid decisions she does here. I didn’t particularly like Dickinson at all; his stilted and standoffish performance (or character?) hardly makes you swoon for their scandalous liaisons.
But Babygirl works for a while, because you’re waiting to see how things are going to spiral out of control. The kink stuff, depending on what gets you off, is at least curious, especially if you watch the movie with a slightly sheltered and wide-eyed girlfriend as I did. Kidman is great, and director Halini Reijn sets Babygirl up for an explosive third act where more than milk hits the fan.
Sadly, things never spiral out of control the way you’d hope. The sex stuff quickly becomes more tedious than sexy. The third act becomes laughable at times, and not intentionally so.
Babygirl has elements that work, but there just isn’t enough here to make this movie work. Reijn takes the movie down the least compelling path possible, resulting in a ho-hum erotic noodle of a film.
Review by Erik Samdahl unless otherwise indicated.