In the cinema of kink – Secretary (2002), The Duke of Burgundy (2014), or, at its nadir, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) – there’s often a pattern of the learned and unlearned, the assured and unassured, and not always in a way that correlates directly to the dynamic of dominant and submissive. It’s often sexuality as the experience of the naif, taken by the hand and led into a private world, the halls of pleasure already constructed and defined by another.
Babygirl is different. Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn, also behind 2022’s amusingly nihilistic slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, has made a BDSM film rife with fumbling uncertainty. Yet it’s no less sexy, unabashedly and giddily so, thanks in great part to its committed leads, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.
