Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Venice Film Festival. A24 releases “ Babygirl ” in theaters December 25. The worst thing your partner could possibly say to you after sex, after you’ve said “I love you,” is the dreaded “love you.
” No “I.” And that’s not the most demoralizing response Romy ( Nicole Kidman ) has for an amorous confession by her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) in “Babygirl,” writer/director Halina Reijn’s provocative erotic dramedy that begins and ends with an orgasm. One of them is faked, but in between, this perversely funny and absorbing new film explores the pleasure gap between men and women , and how our inability to talk about sex limits our ability to just do it.
And there’s lots of sex here, with Kidman going raw inside and out for one of her top performances in a career built on risk-taking. That’s all the way back to her psychosexual breakout in “Dead Calm” and as recently as “Big Little Lies,” where she played a woman in a more blatantly toxic kind of S&M relationship than the sex-positive one her powerful CEO shares in “Babygirl” with a seductive intern, played by Harris Dickinson. The top executive of a New York robotics company who bills herself as a “strategy expert and human expert,” Romy lives in a Manhattan high-rise with her doting playwright husband Jacob and daughters Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly).
In the opening scene, she can’t get o.