Babygirl review – Nicole Kidman overwhelmed by lust as CEO having torrid and toxic affair

Halina Reijn’s film about a company executive’s carnal adventure with her intern is expertly done but suspect at its core, despite Kidman’s bold performance

Romy Mathis owns a duplex apartment in the city and a big house in the country. She has a doting husband, two adorable daughters and a gilded career as the CEO of Tensile, a non-specific “robot business” that runs a successful warehouse delivery scheme. Romy – in the parlance of a women’s glossy magazine – has it all, which naturally means that she wants something else, something more. Before long she has embarked on a perilous affair with her office intern, jumping him in the gents to the strains of INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart.

Romy is played by Nicole Kidman, whose bright, bold performance nonetheless carries a top-note of distress, as though she is not entirely convinced by everything she’s signed up for. She is the star of Halina Reijn’s film, which premieres here in Venice and might have been this year’s Tár – that other big drama about a powerful woman laid low – were it not so superficially pleased with itself, so thrilled by its own daring. Babygirl has some useful and occasionally provocative things to say about inter-office dynamics and sexual desire, but it delivers them with the clipped, perky professionalism of an annual corporate presentation.

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