There are bold scenes for mainstream American cinema but the sexy dom/sub age gap movie can’t quite figure out what it’s saying about desire

Arguably the most transgressive scene in Babygirl, A24’s erotic drama from the Dutch writer and director Halina Reijn that has Nicole Kidman on the awards circuit, is the first one. The film opens with an orgasm – for both Romy Mathis (Kidman) and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), together, in the marital bed. But as Jacob slumbers in post-coital bliss, Romy scampers down the hall – the shot of Kidman’s bare, apple-cheeked behind recalls her first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, one of several erotic 90s touchstones Reijn seeks to invoke and invert through the female gaze. In another room, we witness a private ritual. Her hands desperately flutter across a laptop keyboard; she prostrates on the ground, and makes herself come – for real this time – to porn.

It’s a bold opening salvo for a film, a statement of sorts: this film, arriving amid Hollywood’s long slide toward sexlessness, is not about sex so much as female desire. In less than two minutes, we glimpse a tangle of lust, shame, inner chaos, deception, actualization; what Romy sounds like when she’s faking it and when she’s not. For her, as for many women, desire is a maze, bent by societal pressures and warped by internalized incuriosity, non-linear, combustible and not fully comprehensible.