Babygirl is Halina Reijn’s 2024 American erotic thriller about a CEO who puts a marriage and a company on the line for a D/s affair with a much younger intern. Reijn wrote, directed, and produced. Nicole Kidman plays Romy Mathis; Harris Dickinson is Samuel; Sophie Wilde and Antonio Banderas round out the main cast. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2024, where Kidman won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, then played the Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September. A24 opened it wide on 25 December 2024. Reviews were largely positive. It made $63.8 million on a $20 million budget. The National Board of Review put it among 2024’s top ten and gave Kidman Best Actress. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called the affair “flagrantly ‘wrong’” and sadomasochistic. For kink viewers that is the movie: a fifty-year-old woman who has never come with her husband learns how to kneel for a twenty-five-year-old who understands the power is his.
Romy, Samuel, and a hotel room that rearranges the office
Romy Mathis runs a robotic-process-automation company in New York. Her husband Jacob is a theatre director. Their sex life is a dead room. On the way to work a dog nearly mauls her; a young man calms the animal. That man is Samuel, a new intern who then picks Romy as his mentor. In a private meeting he propositions her. She objects, then kisses him. They meet at a hotel. She worries she is exploiting him because of the title on her door. He tells her he is the one with the power: one phone call and she is finished. In that room, with Samuel dominant, she has an intense orgasm — and then sobs, wrecked by how much she wanted it.
The affair accelerates. Samuel keeps pushing. He shows up at the family’s country house under the pretext of returning a laptop she left at the office and makes himself charming to everyone. Romy, furious at the trespass, tells him her family is everything and he is never to come to the house again. They fight. He says he will request a transfer; she blocks it because a transfer request will raise questions she cannot answer. The stress finally puts the truth on the marriage: she tells Jacob she is sexually miserable and has never orgasmed with him. Desperate, she goes back to Samuel and bargains to continue — after she confirms her submission.
Samuel appears uninvited again, this time at her daughter’s birthday, with Esme, Romy’s secretary, on his arm. Esme already knows. She wants the affair ended, structural changes at the company, and a promotion, or she talks. Romy confesses to Jacob, but she shrinks it to a stranger and a one-night stand, then tries to tell him how badly she needs what she found. He is angrier about the cheating than interested in the need. Later he walks into the country house and finds them together. He and Samuel fight; Jacob has a panic attack; Samuel helps him, then leaves. Teenage daughter Isabel pushes her parents to try again. A board member tells Romy that Samuel has taken a job in Japan, asks whether she had anything to do with it — the implication is that he knows — and invites her to his house when he is alone. She tells him she is not afraid of him and to get out of her office. At home she and Jacob reenact a sex act from the affair; she climaxes. The last image of Samuel is in the hotel room, feeding treats to the dog from the opening; it is left open whether Romy is seeing him or inventing him. The plot is a D/s affair inside a corporate hierarchy, not a tasteful midlife crush. He tops. She submits. The company, the marriage, and the secretary all find out.
How Reijn built a Christmas erotic thriller
In November 2023 it was announced that David Hinojosa of 2AM would produce with Reijn’s Man Up Films, A24 financing. Julia Oh, Zach Nutman, and Christine D’Souza Gelb of 2AM were named executive producers; Oh later moved up to producer. The film is Reijn’s second English-language feature, both with A24. It was meant to be a summer movie. The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes shoved it to Christmas. Workplace temperature was borrowed from Indecent Proposal and Basic Instinct. Reijn set the affair in an American office because U.S. hierarchy and HR rules make the relationship feel more forbidden than it would in Europe. The script started from a story she heard about a woman who had never orgasmed in a twenty-five-year marriage. She has said she wanted to film women’s relationships with their own bodies, and that 1980s and 1990s erotic thrillers — especially Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne — were the engine. Lizzy Talbot was the intimacy coordinator.
Romy is written as 49, Samuel as 25: a 24-year gap. Kidman was 56 during the shoot, Dickinson 27, so the real gap was wider. Reijn has argued that age gaps should be normalized when the woman is older: women are not trapped in that box anymore. Dickinson said the pair barely socialized before cameras, which helped; they had to build trust in the work. Kidman and Reijn prepped in New York, rewrote scenes, traded personal stories, and built the kind of set where Kidman could do the physical and emotional exposure the role demands. Casting news in November 2023 named Kidman, Dickinson, Banderas, Wilde, and Jean Reno, plus John Cenatiempo, Vaughan Reilly, Victor Slezak, Anoop Desai, Maxwell Whittington-Cooper, and Esther McGregor. Principal photography ran December 2023 to February 2024 in New York City.
Sky Ferreira released “Leash,” written and co-produced for the soundtrack, on 2 December 2024. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score landed digitally on Christmas Day through A24 Music. The film uses INXS’s 1988 “Never Tear Us Apart.” A24 could not clear it; Reijn complained to Kidman; Kidman got the rights in a couple of days. That is the production gossip worth keeping. The rest of the Christmas-versus-summer calendar fight is just what a strike does to an erotic thriller.
Venice, TIFF, Christmas Day, $63.8 million
Venice on 30 August 2024 gave Kidman the Volpi Cup. TIFF followed on 10 September. The U.S. and Canadian date was first set for 20 December, then moved to 25 December. VOD in the United States arrived 28 January 2025. On 30 January 2025 A24 said the film had passed $50 million worldwide, putting it inside the studio’s top ten global grossers. By 2 March 2025 the tally was $28.1 million domestic and $35.7 million overseas, $63.8 million total, against a budget of $20 million. Break-even was reported around $50 million, so the picture cleared it.
It opened against Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, and The Fire Inside, tracking around $7 million from 2,115 theatres over five days. Day one was $1.5 million, day two $1.3 million, the weekend $4.4 million and $7.3 million across five days, seventh place. By 1 January it had $10.5 million in eight days. The second weekend barely moved, $4.5 million, a 0.5 percent drop. Then the normal fade: $3.1 million in week three, $1.9 million in week four on 1,460 screens, then a long tail down through Valentine’s Day. In the U.K. and Ireland, opening 10 January 2025, it did $5.1 million between 3 January and 6 February and placed eighth. Ukraine, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Romania, France, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg were called out as strong international markets. On PVOD in the U.S. it was the top rental in its first week, third on iTunes, sixth on Fandango, eighth on iTunes the following week. For a Christmas D/s thriller from A24, that is a hit.
Sadomasochistic, clinical, and not Fifty Shades
Rotten Tomatoes sat at 76 percent from 252 reviews, 6.9/10, with a consensus that Kidman and Dickinson “memorably smolder” while Reijn’s “clinical gaze” keeps a sexually frank thriller “more provocative than prurient.” Metacritic gave 79 from 55 critics, “generally favorable.” CinemaScore was a B–; PostTrak was 67 percent positive, 38 percent “definitely recommend.”
Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times read it, for all its darkness and perversity, as an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when the orgasm gap between men and women — a subject Reijn keeps talking about — could still be treated as a serious problem. Damon Wise at Deadline said Kidman goes the distance, giving Romy a psychological vulnerability Fifty Shades of Grey never had, and a reversal of the film it most looks like, Secretary. He called Dickinson “a monster from the id” with a dorky knife-and-fork haircut. Nicholas Barber at the BBC praised Reijn for refusing Hollywood neo-noir polish, for leaving the intern’s arrival at the family house and the coworker’s discovery looking raw. David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter called it “sexy, dark and unpredictable,” Kidman “in spectacular form, swinging from outrage to fear to ravenously lustful consent,” Dickinson magnetic, Wilde sly. Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair felt the two-way-mirror distance and wanted more heat from a movie this willing to be intimate. Xan Brooks in The Guardian thought the thrills were machine-tooled, as neat as a box from the fictional company’s warehouse, even while he granted Kidman a bright, distressed performance.
Gleiberman in Variety is the review this site keeps: “a shrewdly honest and entertaining movie about a flagrantly ‘wrong’ sadomasochistic affair,” Kidman “fearless,” and, in his later ranking, the best female performance of 2024. Robbie Collin in The Telegraph said it was sharp enough and hot enough, Kidman ferociously good as a level-headed careerist whose buried appetites are both making and unmaking her. Alison Willmore in Vulture called it a self-love story about letting yourself be small for a while. Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert.com loved Kidman’s daring and did not think the movie around her earned it. Kevin Maher in The Times wrote that, like the best BDSM experiences “(they say),” it is slightly contrived but very satisfying. Radhika Seth in Vogue admitted the film splits rooms, then praised Banderas, Kidman, Reijn, and Tapia de Veer. Ben Croll at TheWrap found a surprising lack of cynicism. Martin Tsai at Collider thought it demeaned Kidman more than Dogville had, that Catherine Breillat had already done the material better in Last Summer, and that Reijn lacked the nuance to make it matter. Stephanie Zacharek in Time and Carla Meyer in the Los Angeles Times treated Kidman’s work as among her finest, Meyer calling it Oscar-worthy. Peter Travers said her daring is now legendary. Nick Schager at The Daily Beast saw a woman on a quest for fulfillment and a jolt of entertainment. Richard Roeper singled out Banderas as the steady presence who later shows what he can do. The critical fight is not about whether the sex is D/s. It is about whether Reijn’s cool frame honors that dynamic or embalms it.
Volpi Cup, NBR, milk, and Father Figure
Kidman’s Venice prize and the NBR Best Actress award are the hardware that stuck. The score made the Oscar shortlist for Best Original Score. Kidman and Dickinson landed on the 2024 BAFTA longlists for leading actress and supporting actor. Rolling Stone and IndieWire both put their work among the year’s best performances. The film showed up on multiple 2024 top-ten lists from filmmakers, critics, and editors.
The afterlife was dirtier and funnier than the awards. A milk scene went viral. George Michael’s “Father Figure” came back. Kidman recreated the milk bit during her NBR speech. At the 2025 Critics Choice Awards, Chelsea Handler and Ralph Fiennes did it again as a gag. Fans copied Dickinson dancing to “Father Figure” and Kidman’s poses — standing in a corner, lying on the floor. The first audience was older women; it later split closer to even by gender. In Spain the conversation was about mature female representation. In Ukraine and Denmark, mental-health professionals used the film to talk about female sexuality and aging. Against a run of #MeToo workplace stories, Babygirl offered a CEO who wants to submit, not a CEO who wants an HR file. It also pushed against the bitter-older-woman template that still clings to actresses over forty. Reijn made a Christmas movie in which the hottest thing in the building is a woman in her fifties asking a twenty-five-year-old intern to take the power. That is why it belongs on a BDSM film shelf, not just on an A24 prestige one.
