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The Boss Baby

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The Boss Baby 's talented cast, glimmers of wit, and flashes of visual inventiveness can't make up for a thin premise and a disappointing willingness to settle for doody jokes.

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‘Babygirl’ Review: Nicole Kidman Is Fearless in an Erotic Office Drama About the Age of Control

Halina Reijn's adultery drama recalls films from "Unfaithful" to "9½ Weeks," but with a corporate kinkiness that's both up-to-the-minute and humane.

By Owen Gleiberman

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One of the many reasons that sex scenes in movies have faded as a phenomenon is the omnipresence of pornography. When people can just click on their deepest kinks and favored objects of desire, who needs the carefully staged R-rated “erotic” version?

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Early on, we see Romy in the office and in the mission-statement videos she makes for the company, where every upbeat word is market-tested, including a reference to how “nurturing” the company is — even though its all-robot premise basically results in putting people out of work. (The way Romy sees it, she’s liberating them from menial jobs.) The movie offers up a sly take on what’s happening in corporate culture today, though what gives that its kick is the way that it all connects to Romy’s pent-up sexuality, and to the forbidden office hookup that’s about to ensnare her.

The young man who’s going to ignite Romy’s fantasies is Samuel ( Harris Dickinson ), one of the company’s new slate of interns. That’s right: This is a movie about a fiftysomething boss who falls into an affair with a work dude who’s barely out of college. If “Babygirl” had been made 20 years ago, the movie would probably have been conceived as a “cougar” fantasy. The first time Romy and Samuel saw each other, it would have been all about their animal magnetism. But Reijn does something shrewder than that.

The two characters meet when the interns are given a tour of Tensile’s sprawling lower Broadway office suite. They’re paraded into Romy’s office, at which point Samuel asks her an incredibly rude question about the company’s robot premise. Dickinson, the gifted actor from “The Iron Claw” and “Triangle of Sadness,” his baby face set off by a jagged haircut, is like a more blunt-edged Austin Butler. His Samuel is telling Romy, before they’ve barely glanced at each other, “I make the rules. By breaking yours.” And that’s what’s sexy. These are great-looking actors, yet in “Babygirl” their chemistry is all about — only about — the promise of transgression. Each time Samuel sees Romy at the office, he confronts her with another casually hostile negging remark. He shoots past all niceties and small talk. His “flirting” is an aggro assault. And that’s why she can’t resist it.   

“Babygirl” turns into a shrewdly honest and entertaining movie about a flagrantly “wrong” sadomasochistic affair. In “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” Reijn created a tone of overwrought satirical slasher pulp, but here she settles into a far more realistic mode, and brings it off with flair. The movie is reminiscent, at times, of “Fair Play,” but it’s also a tale of adultery that pushes genuine emotional buttons, the way “Unfaithful” did 20 years ago. And that’s rooted in the fearless performance of Kidman.

Straddling the identities of mother, boss, defiant adulterer, and trembling sexual supplicant, she’s like a walking mood ring. Her Romy takes off from a long-standing (hidden) reality: that people who are hooked on wielding power can have primal fantasies of being sexually submissive. For decades, prominent male executives have been keeping B&D sex workers in business, but in movies we haven’t seen the corporate gender tables turned in quite this way. For a while, “Babygirl” comes on like a less glossy “9½ Weeks,” as Samuel breaks down Romy’s defenses, notably in a scene where people from the office are having cocktails after work and he sends her over a drink … of milk. He’s saying, “You’re my baby girl.” And when she drinks it down, she’s saying, “Yes I am.”

Does it all come tumbling down? “Babygirl” has a conventional design (and one very good eye-candy needle drop, in which the tattooed Samuel snake-dances to George Michael’s “Father Figure”). But one of the film’s strengths is that it avoids the sort of roller-coaster last act that we expect from an “erotic thriller.” There’s an old-school moralism at work in movies like “Fatal Attraction,” where the characters are punished for their sins. Reijn is after something different — she’s out to liberate characters who are too busy punishing themselves. “Babygirl” takes a few turns we don’t expect, but that’s because the movie’s ambition isn’t just to feed the thriller engine. It’s to capture something genuine about women’s erotic experience in the age of control.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In competition), Aug. 30, 2024. Running time: 114 MIN.

• Production: An A24 release of a 2AM, Man Up Film release. Producers: David Hinojosa, Julia Oh, Halina Reijn. Executive producers: Christine D’Souza, Gelb, Erika Hampson, Zach Nutman.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Halina Reijn. Camera: Jasper Wolf. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Cristobal Tapia de Veer.
• With: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas, Esther McGregor, Vaughn Reilly, Victor Slezak.

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Nicole Kidman bridges the orgasm gap in an sexy and surprising exploration of female desire

Time Out says

It takes a film of real chutzpah to needle-drop George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ into a dom/sub seduction scene and not only get away with possibly the most glaringly on-the-nose musical cue in the history of cinema, but have it hold the moment perfectly. Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is that movie: a deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them. Nicole Kidman and Harrison Dickinson are magnificent as the age-(and-HR)-inappropriate duo who disappear into a supercharged office relationship that turns out to be a paradise, maze and prison – all at once. 

Kidman is Romy, the respected and successful CEO of a company that manufactures robots for Amazon-like warehouses. With her iPhone glued to her palm, she’s jokingly accused of being like one of her own automatons, but her human complexities are there from the first scene. She has seemingly satisfying sex with her doting husband (Antonio Banderas), only to slip away straight afterwards to masturbate to BDSM porn.

At work, twentysomething intern Samuel (Dickinson) has an eerie sense of Romy’s unfulfilled needs. He asks for her to be his mentor and she reluctantly agrees, amused by his front. That amusement turns to arousal when he speaks to her in a way no one else would dare. Soon, they’re having an office romance with a saltily BDSM flavour. They head to dumpy Manhattan hotels for awkward trysts where Romy’s reluctance and fear of discovery gradually give way to full submission.

You will never look at a saucer of milk the same way again

Even considering those five Oscar nominations, it’s hard to think of a better, or more committed Kidman performance. And Dickinson, adding a wolfish glint of James Spader to Triangle of Sadness’ s lost-boy male model, is a match for her. Both of them tackle the many sex scenes with zero modesty. You will never look at a saucer of milk or the chocolate on your hotel pillow the same way again.

Not as slinkily arch as Secretary nor as lurid as Disclosure , Babygirl is more of a wickedly funny erotic chamber piece than a ’90s-style sex thriller. And it’s made with real empathy by Reijn. The Bodies Bodies Bodies director told the media at the Venice Film Festival that she wanted her film to bridge the Hollywood’s ‘orgasm gap’, where female pleasure takes a backseat to that of male characters. Mission accomplished, in sweaty and seductive style. Babygirl premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Cast and crew

• Director: Halina Reijn
• Screenwriter: Halina Reijn
• Nicole Kidman
• Sophie Wilde
• Harris Dickinson
• Antonio Banderas

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"Hell Baby"

Like bad houseguests, the creators of “Hell Baby” overstay their welcome. This is partly intentional: much of the comedy in “Hell Baby,” a scattershot but fitfully gut-busting horror-comedy, knowingly uses repetition and dead air. But it soon becomes apparent that the filmmakers, many of whom worked together on “The State” and “Reno 911!”, aren’t committed to their film’s main conceit.

“Hell-Baby” riffs on the newly-revived demonic possession genre. But co-writer/director team Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon aren’t really interested in parodying formula-calcified clichés, so their jokes miss as often as they hit. One in every five scenes is uproarious, but the rest of “Hell Baby” is flabby footage of naturally talented people riffing on so-so material. These guys make the “ Scary Movie ” creators look disciplined.

At first, “Hell Baby” seems to have something to say about class and/or race as it’s used in horror films. An opening montage of half-rebuilt, half-devastated homes situates the movie in post-Katrina New Orleans. Expectant couple Jack and Vanessa ( Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb ) joke about the fact that they live in an area so poor that “white people don’t know it exists.” That observation is confirmed by an unamused black couple sitting on the porch adjacent to theirs.

Jack and Vanessa have just moved into a dilapidated “lower-lower” Garden District home, and it is, of course, haunted. F’resnel ( Keegan Michael Key ), a hilariously nosy neighbor, tells the soon-to-be-parents that they shouldn’t worry: no murders have happened in the last few months (“It’s not like anybody got murdered up in here yesterday.”). But F’resnel is only half-right, and Jack and Vanessa’s unborn child soon attracts demonic attention.

Unfortunately, not much is made of this promising introduction. Garant and Lennon tease viewers with conceptual gags that don’t pan out in the long run. By running their best jokes into the ground, they under-serve some very funny performers. Key steals most of the scenes he’s in, and at first his sendup of token, pseudo-folksy black characters is hilarious. In one scene, F’resnel starts to explain why he lives in Jack and Vanessa’s crawlspace using a “Hamlet” quote. He trails off, and walks away. F’resnel quotes Shakespeare again later in “Hell Baby,” but by that time, the joke’s run its course. He pops up at inappropriate times, says something bizarre, and then mysteriously turns up 15 minutes later, a running gag that soon becomes tiresome.

Another gag—Garant and Lennon’s thickly accented exorcists slowly making their way to New Orleans—exhausts itself as well. Yes, the joke is that they’re very slow. But watching Garant and Lennon spread themselves this thin is exhausting. For example, after orgiastically burping, farting, and moaning their way through a meal of po’ boys, hot-sauce-drenched potato chips and microbrewed beer, Garant and Lennon’s characters recall why they became priests. This scene would be a lot funnier without flashbacks, but Garant and Lennon need the flashbacks so they can finish the scene with a sub- Mel Brooks punchline. 

The cast excels at slapstick humor. The jokes necessarily rely on good cheap thrills and a sense of timing. You’ll get a big kick out of seeing “Franklin & Bash” star Kumail Nanjiani , playing a sky-high cable repairman, slowly crash his van into two garbage cans. But then the movie’s plot resumes, along with your desire to get away from the smart-alecks who don’t know how much is enough.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

• Leslie Bibb as Vanessa
• Keegan Michael Key as F'resnel
• Michael Ian Black as Dr. Marshall
• Brittney Alger as Italian Nurse
• Alex Berg as Mrs. Nussbaum / Cheerful Guy
• Paul Scheer as Ron
• Dave Holmes as Rental Car Guy
• Thomas Lennon as Father Padrigo
• Rob Huebel as Mickey
• Rob Corddry as Jack
• Robert Ben Garant
• Thomas Lennon

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A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern. A high-powered CEO puts her career and family on the line when she begins a torrid affair with her much younger intern.

• Halina Reijn
• Nicole Kidman
• Harris Dickinson
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• 1 User review
• 23 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 1 nomination

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• December 25, 2024 (United States)
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• Runtime 1 hour 54 minutes

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