One of the best surprises out of this year’s TIFF was Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, an erotic pseudo-thriller that gave Nicole Kidman the kind of role that she’s been aching for in the last couple of years. Kidman plays a CEO who gets into a wonderfully bizarre bondage relationship – although her paramour happens to be one of her interns, played by Harris Dickinson. It’s a genuinely funny, well-written, wonderfully performed film, and Reijn directs the hell out of it. Since Oscar season is just around the corner and this thing did pretty great at the fall festivals, A24 finally dropped a trailer for the film on Tuesday morning. It’s there if you want to watch it, but maybe just let yourself get surprised by this one, huh?
Peep it:
As always, you should check out our review for the full details (it’s really good! The movie, not just the review), but in the meantime, here’s the excellent blurb from the TIFF program this year:
“When Romy, the high-powered executive played by Nicole Kidman in ‘Babygirl,’ starts cheating on her urbane theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas), it’s not because their sex life has diminished. As the opening scene explicitly demonstrates, there’s still significant heat between them. But when he goes to sleep, Romy sneaks out of the room to finish, alone, what she clearly couldn’t achieve with him.
When Romy meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an impertinent intern at her company who can intuit more about her than she intends to share — and who’s happy to take control — it’s only a matter of time before they find themselves in a seedy hotel together. They wrestle, literally and figuratively, over a twisty power dynamic. Romy’s age and position give her an advantage, but as Samuel reminds her, he could ruin her life with one phone call.
By some definitions, the film is an erotic thriller, but writer-director Halina Reijn (‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’) is more interested in exploring complex emotional truths than playing by genre rules. Babygirl may evoke some comparisons to Steven Shainberg’s ‘Secretary’ (TIFF ’02), but surface similarities aside, it’s something entirely its own.”
Babygirl hits theaters on December 20.