The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the hyper-competent C.E.O. of a robotics company, who feigns pleasure in her marriage and flirts perilously with a younger man at work until he tempts her into a kinky affair. In this scene, Romy and her paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), were alone in a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, attempting to define their new dynamic. The environs were unsavory—Reijn had chosen blood-red curtains and carpeting specifically to evoke a womb—but there was a charge in the air. The end of the encounter would be the literal consummation of the couple’s mind games: Romy would orgasm.
The lead-up to this climax is long, frankly observed, and, at times, unexpectedly funny, as Samuel haltingly tries to assert dominance. Then something clicks. On set, when the moment of truth arrived, the director of photography, Jasper Wolf, crouched to capture Kidman lying on the floor, on her stomach, as Dickinson loomed over her. The first take was deemed slightly too demure, but Reijn—who turned to directing after establishing herself as one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated actresses—is practiced in the art of teasing out performances. Her advice to Kidman was cheerfully blunt: “Think of a grizzly bear.”
Reijn’s rationale, she explained later, was that a woman might instinctively restrain herself to uphold a feminine ideal; the bear prompt was shorthand for something “completely low and growly and beyond vanity.” Kidman took the note. The resulting take—a closeup that lasts for nearly three minutes—made the final cut. Its fearlessness has already been rewarded. When the movie premièred, this past summer, at the Venice Film Festival, Kidman won the prize for Best Actress. She told me recently that Reijn, in creating the role for her, “gave me something that no one’s given me.” (Last month, Kidman threw her director a forty-ninth birthday party at a Mediterranean restaurant in Tribeca, where the two shared a dance before Reijn blew out the candles.)
The intensity of their bond had been evident throughout the shoot. During production, they would hug, hold hands, and declare their love for each other; sometimes Kidman put her head in Reijn’s lap. After they wrapped for the day, the pair would stick around for an hour just to talk. “She was tender, and that’s what was required,” Kidman told me. “She’s intuitive like that. If she’d been harsh, I think I would have shut down.” Reijn rehearses and preps intensively, discusses her intentions with her cast members, then lets them loose. The process is a form of respect that also leaves room for risk. As Kidman told me, “There’s a very structured part to it—and then there’s a free fall.”
Reijn, who has dark hair, a mischievous smile, and sculptural features, is a compulsive collaborator. She attributes the habit to her background in theatre: in an ensemble, she noted, “you can’t have too much ego—you’re like a school of fish.” She spent nearly two decades performing with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, an acclaimed company then helmed by the director Ivo van Hove, and had leading roles in everything from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” to Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.” As an actress, she found it essential to understand the entire production, not just her own part, and as a director she was determined to afford her cast the same opportunity. For “Babygirl,” her second film in English—she also directed the 2022 horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies”—she talked through the whole script with her principals one-on-one, answering questions and tailoring the screenplay more closely to each actor. When Dickinson saw her chugging caffeine one afternoon as she typed on her laptop, he said, “You shouldn’t have so much coffee”—an expression of concern that struck her as “weirdly fatherly for a young man.” She incorporated it into the script. Early in the film, Samuel offers the same reproach to Romy, and the unexpected flicker of paternalism is part of what catches her interest.
Once the screenplay was done, Reijn worked out all of the blocking firsthand, on location. Wolf, the D.P., filmed her on his iPhone as she whirled from one role to another. Then she made sure that the rest of the crew was on board with her vision. In December, 2023, she assembled a team of twenty-odd people—department heads overseeing costuming, cinematography, production design—for a highly unusual PowerPoint presentation. One of the first slides featured an infographic about the “orgasm gap” between men and women, and a survey that had become an obsession of Reijn’s: it showed that, on average, a woman takes eighteen minutes to climax at the hands of a man. (Originally, she’d wanted the scene in the hotel room to last that long, but the impracticality of this notion quickly became apparent. “I was, like, ‘Put a clock in the corner!’ ” she recalled, laughing.)
The PowerPoint functioned as a kind of mood board, featuring images from Reijn’s own life. There was a photograph of her older sister’s happy nuclear family, which had partly inspired Romy’s seemingly idyllic husband-and-two-kids existence at the movie’s outset, and a snapshot that Reijn had taken of a group of Wall Street interns in ill-fitting suits and backpacks. There were taxonomies of Romy’s sexual fantasies—such as the “daddy dom–little girl” dynamic, a B.D.S.M. subculture that typically involves a dominant man taking on a caretaker role for a submissive woman—and an explanation of the avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud’s concept of the theatre of cruelty, in which a director pointedly assaults the sensibilities of an audience. One slide read, simply, “THE OFFICE IS THE KINK.”
The presentation also included stills from such films as “9½ Weeks” and “Damage,” erotic thrillers from the nineteen-eighties and nineties that had been a revelation for the young Reijn. When we first met, over dinner, she told me that she’d watched “9½ Weeks,” the director Adrian Lyne’s earliest contribution to the genre, “like, six thousand times,” beginning in her late teens. Although the S & M-tinged dynamic between its central couple, played by Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, created a sensation in Europe, American audiences weren’t ready for it. The film was bowdlerized ahead of its U.S. release, in 1986, in response to test-screening walkouts—then bombed anyway. But, the following year, Lyne had a blockbuster with “Fatal Attraction,” which a Time cover story named “the zeitgeist hit of the decade.” (That era had something in common with this one: the Time article characterized the late eighties as a period of “retrenchment along the sexual front lines,” with “pandemic viruses imposing a puritan morality on the would-be-wild young.”) Glenn Close’s performance as an unstable editor who has improbably hot sex with a married man (Michael Douglas), then responds to being dumped by boiling his family’s pet rabbit, kidnapping his child, and attempting to murder his wife, is both indelible and representative of the genre’s absurdities. The film’s box-office success paved the way for a spate of other high-profile erotic thrillers, such as Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct.” These movies were designed to turn audiences on, but their baroque plots supplied a degree of plausible deniability, while the involvement of A-list actors lent a level of prestige: Douglas’s filmography alone includes intimate encounters with Close, Sharon Stone, and Demi Moore.
Reijn came to idolize directors like Lyne and Verhoeven, even as she recognized their limitations. “If you watch all of these movies now, there’s a lot of sexism in them,” she said. (Lyne has described the career women he vilified in his films, including Close’s bunny boiler, as “sort of overcompensating for not being men.”) But some of the kinkier dramas provided affirmation for Reijn, whose own submissive fantasies had been regarded by her therapist as something to “work through.” She told me, “ ‘9½ Weeks’ gave me the permission to even have these ideas that I thought were really bad.”
The trend faded as studios began catering more to families, and as onscreen sex became more readily available through other mediums. Lyne himself recently tried to revive the genre, with the Ben Affleck-led “Deep Water,” but the results were poor. Reijn knew that, in 2024, an erotic thriller would have to look different. “I want to use the tropes but twist them and give them a modern touch—to have fun with them, make them a little camp,” she said. While writing the script, she read books by the relationship therapist Esther Perel, and talked to people in the corporate world about the ways gender norms had shifted since the #MeToo movement. Reijn was fascinated to learn about the media training that many female C.E.O.s receive to appear palatable—and especially by the idea that vulnerability had become something to be marketed rather than denied outright.
“ ‘Babygirl’ is a fairy tale,” Reijn told me. She took pleasure in folding over-the-top circumstances and “airport novel” flourishes into her screenplay. At the same time, she wanted the film’s depiction of sex to feel true. “Sexuality is often portrayed in stories, movies, and paintings as something that is so not the reality,” she said. “It looks either very glamorous or very dark—but for me it’s insanely vulnerable, very embarrassing, and sort of stop-and-go.” The office, with its rigid hierarchies and sharp power differentials, is a rich backdrop for a dom-sub relationship. (Sophie Wilde, who plays Romy’s assistant, noted to Reijn that even her scenes with Kidman had an element of sadomasochism.) For Samuel and Romy, conference-room meetings become a zone of flirtation; a cigarette shared outside a company party turns out to be a prelude to something more.
“We’ve found a fingerprint.”
Cartoon by Charlie Hankin
“This movie is about identity and role-playing,” Reijn said. “As a woman, you feel so much pressure to be the mother, the lover—all these archetypes. I wanted to take this almost literally with Romy. At the beginning, you see her sexually. Then you see her as the mother with the apron. Then she’s the C.E.O.” Absurdist smash cuts between intimate marital moments and corporate speechifying heighten the sense that both the adoring wife and the chilly girlboss are forms of drag. The film calls attention to the artifice of—and the punishing effort behind—Romy’s attempts to self-optimize, which range from Botox injections to E.M.D.R. therapy. (Later, Romy’s surly teen-age daughter announces that the Botox treatment makes her mom look “like a dead fish.”) Nor does the story gloss over Romy’s capacity to manipulate: at one point, she deploys H.R.-approved rhetoric to dissuade a junior employee from pursuing Samuel, saying, with faux concern, “You’re in a position of power over him.”
“I love writing scenes like that, where the female character is corrupt, is greedy, is weak, is dark, is wrong,” Reijn said, of the exchange. Romy was the kind of part she had dreamed of for herself as a theatre actress embodying women who either lacked flaws or were punished for having them. “I’m in conversation both with the nineties sexual thrillers and with all the sort of mythical, iconic parts that I’ve played,” she told me. “I sometimes feel I’m bewitched by these roles, and making these movies almost as a response—even if nobody knows it except me—is healing.”
Reijn was born in Amsterdam in 1975, but her parents—a pair of hippie artists—swiftly transplanted her to the tiny village of Wildervank. When Reijn was growing up, their house guests included both fellow-artists and East German refugees, and her family was virtually off the grid. She and her two sisters were forbidden to watch films or television, though they were encouraged in their own creative pursuits; they painted, played music, and wore homemade clothes that became fodder for their mother’s art installations as soon as they outgrew them. The vibe, Reijn explained, “was basically ‘Midsommar,’ but not throwing old people off of cliffs.”
A breach in the no-moving-images policy proved transformative. When Reijn was six, a bored babysitter took her and her older sister to the movies to see “Annie”; she instantly decided she wanted to be an actress. Her mom helped her join a youth theatre, and her dad built a stage for her at home. “If I’d said, ‘I want to be a dentist,’ he would have built a dentist chair,” Reijn joked fondly. Soon she was writing her own plays and casting her sisters to perform alongside her.
Reijn’s parents separated when she was still young. Her father was gay; he had been open with his wife about that fact, but had believed he could “transcend” his sexuality. “In the end, he did not,” Reijn said. Looking back, she’s happy with her unorthodox childhood, which she credits with shaping her philosophy as an artist. “I don’t want to offer a moral”—an ethic that, she said, comes “purely from my parents.” She went on, “The biggest thing that they told me was always put yourself in the shoes of the other. Like, when your bike is stolen, thank the thief. That is extreme, of course, but for an actor that is amazing. . . . My nonjudgmental attitude is very handy for the work I do.”
At the time, though, Reijn found her upbringing maddeningly unstructured. Around the age of twelve, she insisted on attending a “normal” school in Amsterdam, only to be mocked mercilessly when she showed up with wooden shoes and unshaven legs. Once she adapted to the new setting, she thrived—and became obsessed with imposing order herself. When another student was insufficiently prepared, she bristled; when a teacher was lax or late, she scrawled disapproving callouts on the blackboard.
