Babygirl revives the erotic thriller for a new generation

Canada's David Cronenberg once declared that the "movies were made for sex." The Crash director was pushing back against a puritanical streak in cinema, a trend that over the past couple decades has seen movies become sanitized and eroticism pushed to the margins.

Cronenberg is not alone in his feelings. You can sign Halina Reijn up for whatever he was advocating for. The Bodies Bodies Bodies director, a self-described lover of erotic thrillers, is making cinema sexy again by reviving the genre in one of the year's best films. Her Babygirl is a steamy Christmas season thriller about power games in the boardroom and the bedroom, starring Nicole Kidman (who 25 years ago starred in the greatest erotic Christmas movie, Eyes Wide Shut).

In Babygirl, Kidman is astonishingly ferocious and vulnerable as the CEO of a tech company. She's unsatisfied with the algorithmic sex she's having at home with her husband (Antonio Banderas) and is tempted into an affair with an aggressively hot intern, played by Harris Dickinson. Kinks ensue in a very intentional throwback to late '80s and early '90s fare like 9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct — genre benchmarks Reijn grew up with that the business rarely makes space for today.

"I love them because they made me feel less alone in my dark hidden fantasies," says Reijn, on a Zoom call with CBC Arts. "I thought, especially as a young woman, I wasn't supposed to think all these things. And then I saw those thrillers and I was like, 'It's actually OK. There are other people who have these darker fantasies in their head, and Hollywood is making big movies about them.' So I felt seen by that.

"But I didn't always like the endings," Reijn adds, nodding towards a femme fatale trope these thrillers often leaned into. "People had to get punished or get killed. I thought that was too grotesque for me — not human enough."

Reijn's far more humanist film — along with her female gaze — is in conversation with those earlier classics, the genre fare that was often loaded and layered, especially when directed by Paul Verhoeven. Think Basic Instinct, a neo-noir featuring the infamous Sharon Stone leg cross, which has a Hitchcockian impulse to both scrutinize and reinforce the male gaze.

Beyond cinephilic inspiration, there's another connection between Reijn and Verhoeven. Reijn, who is a former actor, appeared in Verhoeven's sexually charged Second World War spy thriller, Black Book, opposite Carice van Houten, who she would later direct in her feature debut, Instinct. 

Verhoeven has been keeping erotic cinema alive, albeit outside the U.S., with his recent horny nun thriller Benedetta. Before that, the Dutch filmmaker's thorny late-career masterpiece Elle, about a sexual assault survivor engaging in destructive behaviour, entered the #MeToo chat just before the movement really took hold in pop culture and altered the business going forward.

In fact, you could argue that the sex drought in cinema that we've been whining about is a valid response to #MeToo. The assaults committed by Harvey Weinstein and others opened up conversations about actors being vulnerable in the business as well as on-set horror stories like that of Maria Schneider feeling violated during the filming of The Last Tango in Paris. The movement also gave momentum to the fight for gender representation in positions of power, which Reijn recognizes she benefitted from.

"If #MeToo wouldn't have happened, I wouldn't have sat here today," she says, acknowledging her success as an actor who has transitioned to the director's chair. "So #MeToo is everything to me."

But Reijn also expresses her wariness about the post-#MeToo overcorrection, which is what we're witnessing in this repressive tendency to sanitize sex from cinema instead of embracing and confronting it in respectful and healthy ways.

"I think it's dangerous to say, 'We have all these rules, we have all these words and now we're all perfect.' No! We have all these tendencies. We still fall in love with the forbidden fruit … We are still beasts underneath it all. And if we don't shine a light on those tendencies in ourselves that are dark, that is dangerous. We need to talk about this. And here's a story of what happens when you don't talk about it. My movie is a warning in that sense — a light, steamy, hopefully entertaining warning."

With Babygirl, which is as clever and thoughtful as it is scandalizing, Reijn charges headfirst into conversations around consent, power dynamics and even identity politics through a character she sees as an extension of herself. Kidman's Romy is a woman whose repressed desires — and the shame associated with them — drive her to a risky and harmful relationship with Harrison's Samuel. He's a cocksure type who stokes her passion by being so arrogant, dominating and in control, despite her position of power.

Beyond an erotic thriller, Reijn sees the film as a generational comedy of manners, inspired by her time spent with young cast members, including Amandla Stenberg and Rachel Sennott, in the slasher movie Bodies Bodies Bodies, which was very engaged in Gen Z discourse. "I felt like a dinosaur," says Reijn. "They really had to teach me so much about what real feminism is nowadays. My ideas were just so dated … [Babygirl] is about an older generation and a younger generation, and how differently they view things like body positivity, kink positivity, equality in the workplace and how they want to be seen and how they want to be treated."

Babygirl gets especially prickly and provocative when its young characters go beyond educating, and instead weaponize their mastery over language. In one moment, Dickinson's Samuel practically extorts Kidman's Romy, pressuring her to verbally consent to their affair. The words he uses sound empowering, while his manipulative and paternalistic manner undermines that. On paper, he's the vulnerable one, but in that scene, he dominates.

In another moment, Romy's assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), uses full-on blackmail to win a much-deserved promotion and achieve better workplace representation. It's a comically perverse conflation of progressive ideals and bully tactics — a comeuppance far more considerate than the climactic violence erotic thrillers usually resort to.

"Every single one of my characters is using whatever they can to get what they want. As an audience, you're like, 'Who can I root for?' … All my four lead characters are human and ambiguous. All of them are light and dark. And all of them have flaws and beautiful sides to their characters. So that's what I wanted to do [with the erotic thriller]: make it incredibly human and complex."

Babygirl opens in theatres December 25.