Babygirl (2024)

Nicole Kidman blows up her safe space in erotic, provocative ‘Babygirl’. Nicole Kidman’s fearless performance in ‘Babygirl’ turns what could be a conventional thriller into a meditation on female empowerment and control. Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, directors like Paul Verhoeven and Adrian Lyne brought the genre that came to be known as the “erotic thriller” to the forefront of popular cinema.

Not surprisingly, films like ‘Basic Instinct,’ ‘Indecent Proposal,’ and ‘Fatal Attraction’ were also largely written by men and filtered through a male gaze, with the women in the movies perceived as either threats or lacking real agency. ‘Babygirl’ turns that around. Director and writer Halina Reijn (‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’) takes one of the more shopworn tropes of the genre, which could easily be spat out as a conventional, generic thriller, and flips it on its head, aided by a tremendous, raw performance from Nicole Kidman.

‘Babygirl’ isn’t without its flaws, but it’s a movie that will trigger discussion on a deeper level that some of those old chestnuts from three or more decades back.