Warning: The following contains spoilers from the movie “Babygirl.”
“Babygirl” opens on a breathy Romy (Nicole Kidman) riding her husband (Antonio Banderas), culminating in what appears to be a classic, movie-magical, simultaneous orgasm. For someone watching the film with an eye to for its accuracy about sex, this was an effective misdirection: Only 10% to 20% of us with female anatomy can climax this way. I didn’t yet know whether it was the movie or the character that was lying.
Writer/director Halina Reijn immediately resolves any uncertainty: Once her husband drifts off, Romy sneaks into the other room, lies on her stomach with her hands between her legs and finishes to a video clip with subtle Dom/Sub dialogue. Our protagonist isn’t entirely sexually naive, though she’s clearly unsatisfied.
“Babygirl” follows Romy, a high-powered executive who begins an affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), her much younger intern — in which he takes on a dominant role, unlocking her submissive urges. And as part of its exploration of the pair’s fraught power dynamic, the film heavily features a popular erotic trope: dubious consent.
If you’ve ever watched a sex scene and asked yourself, “Am I OK with this…?” there’s a good chance you were witnessing dubious consent. One of the murkiest, most tantalizing examples can be found in Adrian Lyne’s 2002 film “Unfaithful,” in which Diane Lane’s cheating housewife physically resists her younger lover, played by Olivier Martinez, when she attempts to end their affair.
“Stop it. I can’t. I can’t,” she says. “Do you want to f— me? I want you to.”
“Say it,” he replies.
“I want you to.”
Dubious consent refers to scenarios where a character’s agreement to engage in sexual activity is unclear, coerced or given under conditions that erode their genuine, freely given consent. Power imbalance, psychological manipulation, and/or infidelity are commonly at play. When it’s done well, it’s incredibly evocative. But it’s necessary to see first that the would-be-consenting character ultimately wants what they’re being pressured into. In “Babygirl,” our leading lady’s desires are carefully spoon fed to us early on. She’s the “good girl” indulging the “bad thing.” Taboo — a powerful driver of sexual impulse across myriad fantasies — is evident here.
It’s important to note that, within any ethical BDSM practice, clear conversations about boundaries, triggers and safe words are required before anything can commence. But what’s intriguing about “Babygirl,” in which the notion of a safe word doesn’t emerge until the halfway mark, is its interest in depicting characters who are not experienced practitioners of such power dynamics. Though the buzzworthy trailer for the film found Dickinson at his most confident and commanding, for instance, “Babygirl” shows his character fumbling when Kidman invites him to take the reins.
Take Romy and Samuel’s first sexual encounter, in a hotel room. Rather than arriving in full Dom Daddy regalia with an intimidating suitcase full of paddles and Wartenberg wheels, he shows up in a hoodie with a plastic bag and he greets her with, “Oh, you’re here.”
Romy, for her part, tries to take charge, reverting to her role as his boss and elder — a defensive move to avoid the vulnerability of asking for what she really wants.
Here, “Babygirl” appears to understand a common reality behind the kink: many accomplished, strong women (and men) want to turn their brains off and fully submit to the right Dom. It also highlights a common limitation — that for skillful domination, emotional intelligence is equally, if not more, important than physical talent.
The film also understands the power of unlocking such a dynamic, without being gratuitous about the visual details. It doesn’t need to, as Romy’s low, primal, guttural moan at the climax of the sequence says plenty. This experience is new, and it is earth shattering. She melts into tears, and we witness a moment resembling aftercare (though the characters lack the vocabulary to call it that). Dickinson holds Kidman as she weeps, providing a much-needed safe space.
It’s only later, as the affair spirals and the power dynamics of Romy and Samuel’s sexual relationship spill into other parts of the characters’ lives, that “Babygirl’s” handling of sex might give one pause. When Romy confesses her affair to her husband, obscuring the details, she pathologizes her kink with lines like: “I want to be normal,” and “I’ve tried all this therapy…” For a moment, I worried about the implication that there is a causal relationship between trauma and kink. To clarify: While safe kinky play is an excellent forum for navigating and even healing trauma, it’s a harmful stereotype to assume that only “broken” people are drawn to kink.
Romy goes on to say: “It’s not about a safe word or a safe place or consent or the kink… there has to be danger. Things have to be at stake.” But she hadn’t explored these dynamics safely or within boundaries. How could she know that she could only indulge these fantasies in a problematic context?
As with the opening, though, what might first seem like a misstep is just the setup for an imminent payoff — in this case, by presenting and then challenging societal assumptions. By the film’s end, it becomes clear that Romy’s harmful attitude toward her kink led to her infidelity. Through the crisis of “Babygirl,” though, she learns to embrace her desires: Unlike Nora in “A Doll’s House” or the title character of “Hedda Gabler” (both subtly referenced in the film), she repairs her marriage and decides to stay, but not by suppressing her forbidden fantasies. “If I want to be humiliated,” she says to a threatening colleague in one of the film’s delicious final lines, “I’m gonna pay someone to do it.”
Ramadei is a certified sex educator, intimacy counselor and relationship coach best known for hosting the feminist comedy podcast Girls on Porn.