Babygirl review: 'Nicole Kidman is on scorching form'

Babygirl | Contributed

Babygirl (18) ★★★★☆

A Real Pain (15) ★★★★☆

Maria (12A) ★★☆☆☆

Nicole Kidman is on typically scorching form in writer/director Halina Reijn’s new film Babygirl, a provocative erotic thriller about a female CEO (Kidman) who embarks on a kinky affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson). Kidman plays Romy, the archetypal high-flying corporate woman who appears to have it all: a ridiculously accomplished career, a handsome theatre director husband (Antonio Banderas), two spirited daughters, an enviable New York apartment, and a country house for weekends and holidays.

What she doesn’t have — as the film’s explicit opening makes clear — is sexual satisfaction. That all changes when Dickinson’s brash, insouciant Samuel starts at the robotics company she runs. In a portent of things to come, she first notices him outside her office taming a dangerous dog that’s escaped its owner’s leash; before long he’s arousing her hitherto private desire to be sexually dominated and controlled.

Though Babygirl comes on like a throwback to glossy 1980s button-pushers like 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, Reijn — who previously made the sly slasher film Bodies Bodies Bodies — eschews the finger-wagging moralising that made those films inherently conservative. Instead, she takes it in directions you never quite expect, putting a post-#MeToo spin on the genre and using the tech backdrop to tease out the shifting power dynamics of a world where control and desire are illusory concepts that need to be repeatedly negotiated.

Here Dickinson proves a great foil for Kidman, plausibly domineering, but ambiguously vulnerable; it’s never clear what, exactly, Samuel wants. Career advancement? Power? A safe space to embrace retrograde office politics without reprisals? But it’s really Kidman’s film and she throws herself into the role, taking Romy’s hinted-at backstory of a childhood spent in cults and communes and extrapolating from it a complex character trying to navigate the irony of her own desperate need to be in control of how others control her.

Will Sharpe and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain | © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved

Tightly written, directed and performed, actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature, A Real Pain, explores the residual horror of the Holocaust for subsequent generations via a witty and wise road movie following two cousins making a pilgrimage to Poland to visit the childhood home of their recently deceased grandmother (a Holocaust survivor).

Played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, said cousins are an odd pair: once closer than brothers, they’ve drifted apart in recent years, with Eisenberg’s David now a nervy bundle of medicated neuroses whose boring internet job, loving wife and adorable toddler son leave him little time to hang out with Culkin’s Benji, a directionless but charismatic slacker whose ability to say whatever he wants is both energising and infuriating.

Arriving in Poland from New York, they embark on a Jewish heritage tour, where Benji’s simultaneous ability to — as David puts it — “light up a room and sh*t over everything in it” both challenges and enervates the tour group as they visit sites freighted with the sort of tragic history most of them have spent their lives inuring themselves against.

Eisenberg’s deft filmmaking is deceptively moving; you almost don’t notice the subtle way the script teases out its punning title’s multiple meanings, nor how his elegant compositions reinforce the complicated hold the past has on us. Of the small supporting cast, Will Sharpe is the stand-out as the group’s non-Jewish British tour guide, but Eisenberg mines new layers of awkwardness from his own nervy persona, while generously ceding the limelight to Culkin, who roots Benji’s outsized personality in the sort of suffering that leaks out in quieter moments.

Angelina Jolie already has an Oscar, but that doesn’t diminish the air of awards bait desperation oozing from the screen in Maria, a dreary biopic of famed opera singer Maria Callas, set during the final week of her troubled life. Jackie director Pablo Larraín uses Callas’ reliance on sedatives as creative license for a fanciful walk down memory lane, one in which a delusional Maria imagines herself wandering around Paris while being interviewed by a handsome young filmmaker (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as she entertains the possibility of a comeback.

Though there are narrative cross-overs with Jackie (Callas was involved with Aristotle Onassis before Jackie Kennedy and there’s a weird breakfast meeting between the soprano and JFK), the film has none of that film’s myth-interrogating sharpness, nor is it as bold as Spencer, Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight’s horror-movie-inflected biopic of Princess Diana. That’s too bad because there is something intriguing about the way Jolie plays Callas as a cross between Norma Desmond and Miss Havisham, hiding from the real world in her palatial Parisian apartment, haunted by a past she’s trying to block out with pills and the sycophantic praise of her servants.

Alas, in the end there’s not all that much depth to the performance and though Jolie reportedly trained for months for the opera scenes, it just looks like she’s doing bad lip-synching in the finished film.

Babygirl and Maria are in cinemas from 10 January; A Real Pain is in cinemas from 8 January