Cosy crime is one thing. Is this a cosy erotic thriller? An apparently super-transgressive exercise in workplace sub/dom role play but that is weirdly without any actual emotional or corporate consequence, without the menace that was supposed to make it so exciting. Writer-director Halina Reijn gives us what looks like, and in many ways is, a sex-positive reboot of the 90s high-concept erotic thriller. You might set it alongside Barry Levinson’s 1994 film Disclosure about sexual harassment with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, the twist (or op-ed talking point) in that case being that it was the woman harassing the man.
Nicole Kidman plays Romy, an inspirational CEO of a hugely successful company in the big city specialising in fulfilment-centre automated delivery systems; she is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director currently working on a production of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s play about an unhappy marriage, with trendy Ivo van Hove-type projections on screen. They have two teen daughters, one queer, one apparently straight. Romy and Jacob have a lot of sex, but she can only really climax by rushing off to another room straight afterwards and watching porn on her MacBook; Jacob doesn’t seem to wonder where she’s got to. Romy’s career is sailing along and, interestingly, she is absolutely upfront about the Botox she’s getting and endures with motherly exasperation jibes from her daughter about resembling a “dead fish”.
