Opinion | The Surprising Sexual Politics of Nicole Kidman’s Kinky ‘Babygirl’

It has been a ghastly year for American women — at least those of us who are not looking forward to being ruled by a claque of cartoon chauvinists — but a pretty rich year for women in the movies.

One of 2024’s biggest hits featured an unfairly maligned woman who channels her galvanic anger into a fight against fascism. (I’m talking, of course, about “Wicked.”) Demi Moore gave a scenery-chewing performance in “The Substance,” a gruesome body horror film about the pressure on women to stay nubile. Amy Adams starred in Marielle Heller’s supernaturally inflected “Nightbitch,” in which a woman starts to go feral, perhaps literally, amid the tedium of early motherhood. Mikey Madison was incandescent as a street-smart sex worker from a post-Soviet country in “Anora,” a movie that takes the silly Cinderella fantasy behind “Pretty Woman” and explodes it.

But perhaps the most unlikely feminist film of the year is the much-hyped, extremely kinky “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, which opens on Dec. 25. It’s a movie that satirizes the archetype of the girlboss but ultimately affirms it. On the cusp of our terrible new era, it felt, for all its darkness and perversity, like an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when equality seemed close enough at hand that the orgasm gap between men and women — something the movie’s director, Halina Reijn, often talks about in interviews — could be a subject of serious concern.

This wasn’t the takeaway I was anticipating going into the movie, although, in truth, I’m not sure what I was expecting. In a recent profile in The New Yorker, Reijn, a feminist, said she grew up idolizing the directors of 1980s and ’90s erotic thrillers like Adrian Lyne, the maker of “Fatal Attraction,” to which “Babygirl” has frequently been compared. That movie, about a female stalker with a shrieking biological clock, was so reactionary that it’s the centerpiece of a chapter in Susan Faludi’s book “Backlash.” Faludi quoted Lyne saying, of feminist professionals, “Sure you got your career and your success, but you are not fulfilled as a woman.”

At least on the surface, the premise of “Babygirl” seemed like one Lyne might appreciate. The film centers on Kidman’s Romy, an icy executive with an outwardly perfect life — big job, loving family, multiple homes — who suffers over her unrealized desire to be sexually dominated. It comes out at a moment of misogynist retrenchment both politically and in parts of popular culture. (No one who read “Backlash” should be surprised by the rise of tradwives.) So despite Reijn’s politics, I wondered if her film would be an augur of a new, postfeminist Hollywood moment. It’s not. If anything, the problem with “Babygirl” — and here’s the place to stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers — is that, for all its psychodrama, it lands on a message of female empowerment that feels a little trite.

Though it’s billed as a thriller, “Babygirl” is really more of a black comedy about middle-aged self-discovery. As Reijn said when she introduced the movie at a screening this week, she was animated by a very personal question when making it: “Is it possible to love all the different layers of myself, not just the ones that I like to present to the outside world?”

Romy is a woman who tightly controls her self-presentation. She’s the C.E.O. of a robotics company with the highly suggestive name Tensile. In bed she performs porn-style fake orgasms for her husband. An early scene has her badgering her queer daughter to change out of her baggy clothes for a family Christmas photo. We see Romy getting Botox and standing naked in a cryotherapy chamber — a welcome acknowledgment, rare in Hollywood, that beauty, especially after a certain age, can be its own kind of grueling labor. Rehearsing a corporate presentation, she speaks of the need to “look up, smile and never show your weakness.” A media trainer corrects her, arguing that showing vulnerability can help win over an audience.

That trainer, however, doesn’t recognize just how vulnerable Romy is, both because of an unstable childhood that’s vaguely alluded to and, more urgently, because of her secret fetish, which fills her with corrosive shame. Somehow Samuel, an impudent intern played by Harris Dickinson, recognizes this in her. “I think you like to be told what to do,” he tells her in one of their first meetings. They begin a tempestuous affair in which he degrades her, and thus satisfies her, in a way that her uxorious husband does not. Especially in a post-#MeToo world, the affair could blow up her impeccable life. And there are moments when it seems that Samuel, who displays some stalkerish behavior, might try to do just that.

But Reijn, aiming to make a movie about female sexual liberation, is determined not to punish her characters for their transgressions. It’s a choice I sympathize with but one that lowers the narrative stakes a bit. Ultimately, the drama in “Babygirl” is about Romy’s coming to terms with her desires and integrating them into her life in a way that’s not self-destructive. At one point, a powerful man she works with who has somehow figured out her secret tries to use it to sexually harass and possibly extort her. “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” she hisses. “If I want to be humiliated, I’m going to pay someone to do it.” At least in the cinema, women can have it all.