The Grammar of Wanting

There's a particular kind of restlessness that settles in around 2 a.m. when you're lying next to someone you love but cannot reach. The distance isn't physical. It's something else, something that lives in the space between what you perform and what you actually feel. Halina Reijn's Babygirl understands this distance intimately, even if the film itself sometimes loses its footing in the dark.

Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a tech CEO whose life is so immaculately constructed it practically hums with suppressed frequency. She has the husband, the children, the corner office, the handwritten lunchbox notes. She also has a body that wants things her rational mind finds inconvenient. When Samuel, a young intern played by Harris Dickinson with a kind of angular, unnerving patience, looks at her across a crowded lobby, something in Romy's carefully managed architecture begins to shift.

The film is interested in power, obviously. Who holds it, who surrenders it, how the exchange can feel like relief. But what struck me, or rather what I kept returning to afterward, is how Reijn frames desire as a form of knowledge. Romy doesn't learn what she wants through conversation or therapy or introspection. She learns it through the body. Through the specific electricity of being told "Good girl" by someone who shouldn't have that kind of access to her.

Kidman is extraordinary here. She has always been skilled at playing women whose surfaces don't quite match their depths, and Romy requires exactly that tension. There's a scene where she watches Samuel from across a room, and you can see her trying to locate herself within the feeling, trying to name it before it names her. It's the kind of performance that rewards attention to small things: the way her breathing changes, the micro-adjustments of composure.

Dickinson, for his part, makes Samuel more than a fantasy projection. He's strange, a little awkward in his confidence, quick to retreat into embarrassed laughter. The film needs him to be both commanding and uncertain, and he manages it. Mostly. There are moments when the writing asks him to be more symbol than person, and those scenes flatten.

Which brings me to the film's limitations. Reijn wants to tell a story about female desire that doesn't end in punishment, and I admire that impulse. But the secondary characters, particularly Sophie Wilde's ambitious assistant and Antonio Banderas's oblivious husband, feel underwritten. They exist to complicate Romy's situation without ever quite becoming dimensional themselves. The power dynamics the film wants to interrogate sometimes feel gestured at rather than fully inhabited.

Still. There's a quality to Babygirl that has stayed with me, the way certain films do when they've touched something true even imperfectly. It captures how wanting can feel like vertigo. How the thing you're ashamed of might also be the thing that makes you most alive. Romy's journey isn't toward resolution. It's toward honesty, which is messier and less satisfying and probably more accurate.

I biked home from the cinema in the cold, thinking about all the small negotiations we make with ourselves. The film doesn't answer its own questions. I'm not sure it should.