Babygirl
Babygirl is a well-made, beautifully shot, expertly performed film built around an argument most traditional viewers will find deeply objectionable. It is not a film to dismiss. It is a film to understand before dismissing.
Full analysis below
This film draws you in for a significant portion of its runtime with traditional or neutral content before springing its woke agenda. Know before you go!
NOT A WOKE TRAP. Babygirl's content is visible from its first frame. The marketing was explicit: a powerful female CEO has a sexual affair with her much younger male intern. The Venetian Film Festival premiere and the subsequent press coverage left no ambiguity about the film's erotic and ideological content. The director's prior film, Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), established her sensibility as provocative and sexually frank. Nicole Kidman's Volpi Cup win at Venice was awarded specifically for her performance in an explicitly erotic thriller. Conservative viewers who paid any attention to the publicity knew exactly what this film was. There is no delayed ideology. The affair begins in the first thirty minutes. The BDSM dynamics are established shortly after. Nothing is hidden until after the halfway point.
Babygirl is a well-made, beautifully shot, expertly performed film built around an argument most traditional viewers will find deeply objectionable. It is not a film to dismiss. It is a film to understand before dismissing.
Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) runs a robotics company in New York. She is successful, powerful, and sexually unfulfilled. Her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) is a theater director she loves and cannot fully desire. She meets Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a 25-year-old intern at her company, who almost immediately recognizes her psychological hunger and begins exploiting it. He says, in their first private meeting, that he is the one with the power because he could get her fired with one phone call. He means it. She knows it. The affair begins.
Director Halina Reijn is making a specific argument with this film: that female desire exists independently of female responsibility, and that a woman's submission fantasies do not contradict her feminist identity or professional authority. She makes this argument with precision and commitment. The film does not pretend Romy is not risking everything. It does not insulate her from the consequences of her choices. But it ultimately refuses to punish her in the way that a traditional moral framework would require.
Jacob discovers the affair. He is devastated. He and Romy have a confrontation that is emotionally devastating. And then, in the film's most ideologically loaded decision, he forgives her. The marriage survives. The film ends with Romy having gotten what she wanted, experienced what she needed, and kept what she had.
This is a feminist fantasy dressed in the clothes of a psychological thriller. The real power fantasy is not the BDSM content. It is the ending. Women watching this film are invited to imagine: what if you acted on your desires and kept your life? What if the consequences were temporary? Reijn knows this is the film's most radical move. She made it deliberately.
From a VVWS standpoint, the case is straightforward. The film's central narrative frame is marital infidelity presented with consistent sympathy for the person committing it. Jacob is a good man who is deceived. His emotional pain is real. The film acknowledges this and then prioritizes Romy's emotional journey above it. This is not a balanced treatment of infidelity. It is advocacy for female desire as the primary moral consideration in a marriage.
The BDSM framing adds another layer. Samuel's dominance over Romy is presented as genuinely transgressive and genuinely satisfying. The film argues that Romy's desire for submission in her private life is not pathological but is, in fact, an authentic expression of her psychological complexity. This is a position with some psychological validity. It is also a position that carries ideological freight: the film is arguing that female submission fantasies are not evidence against feminism but are consistent with it. That argument is available to make. Making it is a choice with ideological consequences.
The film is expertly made. Kidman is extraordinary. Dickinson is excellent. The score is genuinely unsettling. The cinematography by Jasper Wolf is beautiful. Reijn directs with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what film she is making. If you agree with its argument, it is a liberatory work of art. If you don't, it is a film that asks you to invest two hours in sympathizing with adultery and sexual compulsion. VVWS exists to help you make that decision before the credits roll.
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marital Infidelity Presented With Protagonist Sympathy | 5 | 0.7 | 1.8 | 6.3 |
| BDSM/Submission Framed as Feminist Self-Discovery | 4 | 0.7 | 1.8 | 5.04 |
| Female Career Identity as Primary Self-Concept | 3 | 0.7 | 1 | 2.1 |
| Marriage as Site of Sexual Frustration and Oppression | 3 | 0.7 | 1.8 | 3.78 |
| Older Female Sexuality as Liberatory Spectacle | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 19.2 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marriage Survives: Institutional Persistence | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Consequences for Infidelity Are Real and Shown | 2 | 0.7 | 1 | 1.4 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 4.4 | |||
Score Margin: -15 WOKE
Director: Halina Reijn
FEMINIST PROVOCATEUR. Reijn is a Dutch actress turned director whose worldview is explicitly feminist and sexually progressive. Her debut feature, Instinct (2019), also explored female sexuality and power dynamics. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) was a Gen Z horror satire that treated woke social dynamics as both the subject and the comic engine. Babygirl is her most ambitious statement: a film that argues a woman's sexual desires, however socially transgressive, are real and demand acknowledgment.Halina Reijn is a Dutch actress and director who built her reputation in Dutch theater and film before transitioning to English-language productions. As an actress she starred in Paul Verhoeven's Elle (2016), which covered adjacent thematic territory around female desire and power. Her directorial work has focused consistently on female sexuality as both personal and political terrain. Bodies Bodies Bodies was celebrated by critics for its sharp comedy and social satire. Babygirl represents an escalation in ambition and explicitness. Reijn wrote and directed the film, maintaining full authorial control over its perspective. The film's argument, that a woman's need for sexual submission does not contradict her feminist identity or her social power, is Reijn's own. She has defended it in numerous interviews with the confident directness of someone who knew exactly what film she was making.
Writer: Halina Reijn
Reijn wrote the screenplay herself, drawing on psychological thrillers of the 1990s and the tradition of European erotic cinema. She has cited Basic Instinct and The Piano Teacher as influences. The script is disciplined in its refusal to moralize: it does not punish Romy for her desires, nor does it fully endorse the destruction those desires threaten to cause. The film's resolution, in which Jacob (Antonio Banderas) accepts Romy's infidelity and the marriage continues, is the script's most ideologically charged decision. Reijn has explained it as a refusal to punish female desire with conventional dramatic consequences. Critics of the film would describe the same choice as a refusal to acknowledge that infidelity has real victims.
Adult Viewer Insight
Conservative adults should know precisely what they are walking into: a film that sympathizes entirely with a married woman who has a sustained sexual affair with a subordinate, and that ends with the marriage surviving after minimal consequences. The film does not present infidelity as consequence-free. Jacob's pain is real and depicted with care. But the narrative architecture places the audience's identification squarely with Romy, and the ending rewards her with forgiveness she did not earn through any visible change in her relationship to Jacob. This is a film that makes adultery feel emotionally coherent from the inside while declining to examine it seriously from the outside. It is technically accomplished and thematically honest about its own intentions. Those intentions are incompatible with a traditional understanding of marriage as a covenant that obligates both parties to fidelity.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, and language. This is adult content appropriate only for viewers 18 and older. The sexual scenes are frequent, explicit, and integral to the film's thematic argument. The BDSM content is not gratuitous but it is sustained and intense. The film's ideological content, its sympathetic treatment of adultery and its refusal to morally condemn its protagonist's choices, is as important to flag for parents as the explicit content.
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