While the internet continues to debate the “necessity” of sex scenes in cinema, the sickos and freaks among us are crying out for more carnal pleasure on screen. To deny the existence and power of desire is to deny a valuable (often fun!) part of the human experience – collectively we’ve been doing it since the beginning of time, but apparently it’s still considered more distasteful to simulate sex than to depict someone being violently murdered.

In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, corporate high-flier Romy (Nicole Kidman) knows all about the power of denial. Despite being adored by husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), she’s never once orgasmed during sex with him in 19 years of marriage – she instead sneaks off to masturbate while watching BDSM porn. Romy has convinced herself that her desire for a more dominant sexual partner is shameful, instead throwing all her energy into running her successful tech automation company. Yet when she’s introduced to Samuel (Harris Dickinson), the new, strong-willed intern, her repressed appetite comes back with new voracity.

Reijn first explored illicit desire and gendered power dynamics in her feature debut Instinct (where a prison therapist develops an infatuation with her violent, charismatic patient, who is a convicted serial rapist) and Babygirl is perhaps more palatable in a sense: the older woman still possesses the traditional position of superiority (her job) but her intrigue and infatuation with a younger man pushes her to rescind some of her hard-won control. But as Samuel – projecting boyish confidence but preternatural wisdom – points out, “I think you like being told what to do.”

What Romy discovers with Samuel is not the existence of her sexual desires, but the space to explore them. Meeting for illicit trysts in opulent hotel rooms (her choice) and grimy underground raves (his choice) they find each other again and again, despite attempts to call it off. The chemistry between Kidman and Dickinson is stratospheric but not purely sexual – Romy and Samuel are as vicious with each other as they are tender, each able to see something in the other that no one has even tried looking for. And while Kidman has long possessed a glassiness that makes her hypnotic to watch, here there is real vulnerability too, in the nervous dart of her eyes and the way she squirms as she tries to hide her naked body from Samuel’s gaze.

It’s the sort of intelligent, elegant adult filmmaking that is frequently lacking in modern cinema, approaching a complex theme not only with nuance and empathy but refreshing candour. Reijn’s wry swipes at the language of pinkwashed corporate feminism land much better than the Gen Z jokes of Sarah DeLappe’s Bodies Bodies Bodies script, and an exchange re. the “male fantasy” of “female masochism” wryly exorcises another old myth about what (some) women want. Babygirl joins a limited canon of films that takes the much-maligned subsect of female sexual desire seriously, while also serving as a compelling psychodrama about the intricacies of trust and understanding, even in a long-standing relationship.

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