In Babygirl (2024), Nicole Kidman’s character is bored. Very bored. Bored with her family. Bored with herself. Bored with maintaining a social veneer while denying herself. Romy constantly fakes orgasm with her husband (Jacob, played by Antonio Banderas) and is casually trolled about her accent and botox by her annoying, mullet-ed daughter, a slacker with a Billie Eilish look (Esther McGregor’s Isabel). Bored, and so high-functioning in her roles as a mother and wife, while outshining as a CEO for a company specializing in automation and warehouse logistics. The irony being that she herself feels like a robot: Fantasizing about someone telling her what to do, she’s only satisfied when climaxing to laptop Daddy porn, too much of a control freak to lose control of herself.

We meet Samuel the intern (Harris Dickinson) when Romy, on her way to work, is almost mauled by a dog, only to be charmed by a cookie. After picking her as his mentor – though she had no idea she was on such a list – he proceeds to tease her, asking if she wants a cookie, too; during a mentorship meeting, he says she likes being told what to do. Soon, Romy is picking up Samuel’s tie and stuffing it in her mouth, an obvious nod to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), where Isabelle Huppert gorges herself on the used tissues in a sex-kino booth. But where the latter image was shocking, the update feels punchless: The fact that the tie had been left at her house during a party, where she watched the intern flirt in a corner to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” (2016), tritely brings to mind Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012–17).

Samuel, meanwhile, has a strange man-child quality. He awkwardly laughs when he says commands, just as he slips in and out of role play as if they are “two children and we’re playing and that’s natural.” The suit he wears looks big on him. One directive manages to recreate Martin Kippenberger’s 1992 sculpture Martin, Into the Corner … more meme than erotic transgression (Romy doesn’t even want to stay in the corner!). His stumbling awkwardness might succeed in a man struggling with contemporary straightness, wanting to assert himself, but also to talk consent, only to fail on both counts as this weird, gelatinous mass of adjacency.

Probably the most interesting part of the film is, with its subtle irony, a scene of role non-performance by the CEO and her husband, a theater professional. Musing over the role of Hedda Gabler (1891) by Henrik Ibsen (“Was it suicide?”), Jacob asks Romy, incessantly on her phone, “Am I relevant as a director to you?” In Ibsen’s play, the protagonist is bored, trapped in both her marriage and a scandal which threatens to bring down her social standing. Jacob clearly isn’t relevant to Romy’s needs, nor can he “direct” Romy in the way she fantasizes. Yes, she wants him to get rough and smother her in a pillow – but mainly so she can imagine that it’s Samuel.

How doesn’t anyone catch on that she’s having an affair? She’s texting Samuel day and night, we often see them sleeping in a bed (rather than, say, her corporate suite), and she’s even caught by her daughter sneaking back home from the club. Esme (Sophie Wilde), Samuel’s girlfriend, insists Romy stops seeing the intern, though she won’t go public as she admires a CEO who’s broken the glass ceiling (or wants a promotion and can use this as blackmail).

Speaking with friends abroad prior to the film’s German release, I’d feared another vanilla, Fifty Shades-esque tote bag for transgression; at best, I hoped it might be like Secretary (2002). The corporate-exec-boredom shtick reminds me of Michel Houellebecq and the hollowness of capitalism, which feels very 90s and Gen X to critique (and, at this point, pretty ran through). Babygirl isn’t pointed or deep or funny like Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000). Instead, it’s a silly film, a very A24 one. (Need I explain: a shiny, Netflix-n-chill/ airplane movie, for the background, unengagedly there.)

I’d watched an interview with director Halina Reijn in which she referenced Fatal Attraction (1987), 9 ½ Weeks (1986), and Basic Instinct (1992). But Babygirl is to sex and kink what Saltburn (2023) was to “class.” I understood its target audience could be youth tired of the moral surveillance of the late 2010s as well as the deliberately basic chic of normcore. Of course, indie sleaze as an aesthetic never really had to really deal with actual predators, à la Terry Richardson and Russell Brand; it was all about a fantasy of saying “Fuck it! I’m horny and I want to be messy.” Babygirl’s stupidly unconvincing club scene reminded me most of FKA Twigs’ new album, EUSEXUA (2025), which, mining the likes of Ray of Light-era Madonna and Björk, passed Y2K’s safe, already dug-out cliches of “transgression” through a Uniqlo filter (the only aggressive thing about the latter is its marketing campaign).

What does transgression even mean these days? Club and kink aesthetics have been normalized to the point of becoming a Temu-style starter pack – How to Get Into Berghain for Normies in Harnesses. The same can be said for antique hipster gays and cruising aesthetics, even if it’s actually far more subversive to wear a keffiyeh right now (the irony is not lost on me that the same scarf was immensely popular during peak indie sleaze). Similarly, Babygirl’s use of George Michael’s “Father Figure” (1987) in a dowdy hotel room is, as an artistic choice, utterly, brainrottedly Chat GPT, while Samuel’s attempt to explain consent and “outdated modes of sexuality” to the older Jacob, who responds that Samuel is simply being played, is pure clickbait to different generational cliches.

This mix of corporate boredom and transgression – rather, fantasies of transgression – reminds me of Nick Broomfield’s Fetishes (1996), a documentary of a midtown dominatrix boudoir from 90s NYC. The clients were almost exclusively corporate white-collars tired of being in control and wanting to give it away. Also of the one time I went to SNAX, the annual fetish party at Berghain. I met a guy dressed in expensive leather. Afterwards, I asked, “So what do you do?” He was a banker from Frankfurt, of course – what a turn off. Sure, maybe the dancefloor really once was a zone of temporary autonomy – but hasn’t it become just another excess permitted and rigidly defined by our liberal-bureaucratic control societies? Is it still transgressive when one is doing kink in the correct zone? Isn’t that as sexy as separating one’s trash? We all know the Hegelian Master / Slave dialectic where the sub is in control, just as we’ve all walked into an opening knowing we’re a bunch of rich collectors’ performing bears.

Babygirl saves its worst for last: Romy stays in her boring marriage, clicking her red shoes while fantasizing over her intern (who moved to Japan, as one does) as if her kink tryst had saved the day. Is that all that was needed? Wouldn’t it be more feminist – or simply more human – to just … leave Jacob? Maybe be single? Or find someone who can satisfy her? Kidman’s incredible acting talents are let down by not only a lack of depth, but also of confusion. I would have loved to read this film as a caricature of role failure – a Hedda Gabler-like story where everyone is contemptible, miserably motivated by selfishness and social climbing. I think of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), where Kidman was cast as a woman strong enough to say she wanted to be rid of her familial duties; here, she’s just cos-playing Tom Cruise’s descent into fantasy-chasing. It’s sad, with Babygirl’s marketing emphasis on its woman director, that Romy isn’t allowed the same agency. Maybe her family deserves each other – no less than our culture of passivity and permissiveness deserves this film.