Review of Babygirl, directed by Halina Reijin

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

It also helped that a bit ago a teenager totaled my car, and because I didn’t have a consistent income, I decided to not get one as most of my freelance work was at home. I was going a little bit insane during this time as well because I was literally homebound in the suburbs of the United States, which means there’s no public transportation.

My local library branch, which I went to once a week to restock on books and DVDs, was a place I often found salvation in. I love libraries from the bottom of my heart, and as someone who runs a book, movie, and lifestyle blog, I often recommend libraries if you have access to them. A good library and access to it is an immense privilege, as I know many in the world can’t get to physical book copies.

So it was at my library, in the new DVD arrivals section, that I found a copy of Babygirl. And let me tell you: I knew nothing about this movie, and had kind of assumed it was about something else. I read the synopsis and did not realize the extent of the erotic parts of the movie, so when I was watching it, I had wide eyes.

Thank god I watched it when no one else was home too! I can’t imagine trying to explain myself to my family if they walked in the door and saw some of these scenes.

Let’s get into the review, as I can tell I’m rambling already in the introduction.

A CEO begins a steamy affair with her new intern, leading to some interesting consequences.

In this movie, Nicole Kidman portrays Romy Mathis, a CEO of a robotic automation company based out of New York City. She’s married to a theatre director with two children, but she often finds herself wishing for more because of the lack of sex and inspiration she’s feeling during it. Things are about to change dramatically one day when she’s almost attacked by a dog while going to work.

A young man stops the dog from completely mauling her, and it turn out he’s Samuel, the new intern at her company. The interns are allowed to pick a mentor, and he selects Romy. During a private meeting between them, she kisses him and that’s the beginning of the end for these two.

Romy tries to resist her feelings about the situation at hand, but then she meets him at a hotel. She thinks she might be playing into a power dynamic because of their positions that she doesn’t want to feed into, but then he tells her he can easily get he fired by exposing her. They end up having a D/s session in the room, showing that Romy’s sexual desire is awakened by Samuel in a way her husband can’t do.

However, she starts crying when she realizes this, but continues to see him and have sex whenever they meet up. Samuel seems to be someone who wants to go further though, as he literally shows up to her country home when her entire family is there. He acts like he needs to return her laptop but actually wants to see her; Romy pulls him to the side and tells him to never come here again, as her family means everything to her.

Samuel says he’s going to transfer departments, but Romy refuses because she thinks it will cause questions. When he leaves, Romy tells her husband how much she isn’t able to have sex with him and enjoy it, leading to some more hurt feelings. Despite all of this, after these events, Romy continues to see Samuel. A breaking point occurs though when he shows up to her daughters birthday party with her executive assistant, who he’s now apparently dating.

Worst of all, the executive assistant knows everything about their weird power dynamic, and she tells Romy to end it. Romy then ends up telling her husband about everything except the identity of who she had the affair with, which makes him even more upset about everything. Things get worse when he walks in on Romy and Samuel in the country home together, leading to a panic attack.

With the help of their daughter, Romy and her husband decide to try and make things better for themselves and rekindle their marriage. Samuel leaves for Japan, taking a new job, and a board member questions Romy about why he left. He suspects she might have played a part, but turns out he knows about the affair and invites her to his house. Romy kicks him out of her office in disgust.

The film ends with Romy and her husband having sex at home the same way she used to with Samuel, but she only has an orgasm when she imagines Samuel.

Overall Thoughts

To me, one of the more interesting parts of this movie is how it flips the stereotype of the male boss going after a female employee. We see even the assistant saying that Romy should be a role model for other women in the company by not engaging in the affair, which is a double standard in itself.

I don’t think anyone should be engaging in this behavior, but the fact Romy is criticized for it when men typically aren’t, and it’s even romanticized in film and literature in some ways when men do it. That’s a commentary in itself, and it’s also very interesting that Romy is depicted as someone who isn’t sexually satisfied with her husband despite them being somewhat happily married.

Besides these compelling points to me though, I didn’t care for this movie. I like to go outside of my taste at times and see what’s out there in the world, but I feel like erotic movies that lack a driving force that’s really compelling are hard to watch. I watched Woman in the Dunes not long after this and felt like that was more suited to my personal taste, which is okay.

I say go watch this one if you’re interested! You might find it more worth it than I did, especially as taste is so incredibly subjective. What I might dislike could be your favorite movie—and neither of us are wrong in the end about what we like!

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