Uptight downtown: "Babygirl"

Before she turned writer-director, Halina Reijn acted in films by Paul Verhoeven (2006's Black Book) and Peter Greenaway (2012's Goltzius and the Pelican Company), making her a prime candidate to try and revive the Nineties-style erotic entertainment Stateside. Any even partly sympathetic review of Reijn's latest Babygirl is going to have to concede it's not much of a thriller - don't, whatever you do, go in expecting the thrusting corporate intrigue of 1994's Disclosure - but it plays surprisingly well as tangled comedy-drama, and may just function as satisfying fantasy fare for viewers of a particular disposition, in the same way the Fast & Furious movies have done for boy racers the world over. Nicole Kidman's Romy is presented to us as a woman who seemingly has it all: married to theatre director Antonio Banderas, her day job the CEO of some package-picking organisation, she's been blessed with a nice house, sweet kids and regular sex - though she elects to finish herself off in an adjacent room with the help of BDSM porn, a dirty secret she hasn't yet been able to breach with her man. This life of routine is disrupted when Romy crosses paths with the disarmingly upfront Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern introduced subduing an aggressive dog on the street. Samuel similarly stands up to Romy - it helps that Dickinson is one of the few leading men who've matched Kidman for height - having spotted that some sweet spot between her ears or thighs is frustrated with being treated like corporate royalty; he's a diagnostic tool ("I think you like to be told what to do") for a woman who's long been geared towards smooth running, but who secretly - in her own mind, shamefully - prefers things at least a little rough. One reason Babygirl will disappoint anybody expecting thrills is that it's been specifically directed towards the easing of tensions; instead, Reijn proposes something else, a fond profile of a woman who appears effortless before the camera and in the boardroom, but who finds communication elsewhere, notably in the bedroom, difficult in the extreme.

It is, granted, another in the recent run of Movies About Business, a project couched in a certain way so as to be greenlit by actual executives. (It's quietly revealing that Babygirl should be opening on the same weekend as Maria: sent out to fight among themselves, here are two tony, female-led awards contenders the industry isn't sure what to do with, nor what the audience is going to make of them.) Yet it has two factors that kept me onside: an emotional complexity that owes more to the European arthouse than it does to those Fifty Shades movies, and Nicole Kidman, operating on another level altogether. Where Maria's Angelina Jolie is all surface, Kidman goes deeper and pushes further still. It's not just in the intimate scenes, which make us feel sorry for Keith Urban, but in the linking contextual sequences in which Romy submits to Botox, cryogenic freezing and (somehow worst of all) business podcasts, and the movie cops to the processes to which women who've grown used to a certain quality of life - possibly including La Kidman herself - feel obliged to submit on a regular basis. (Somewhere in these brisk, matter-of-fact cutaways: what The Substance might have exposed, were it not so keen to exploit Demi Moore's desperation.) As a performance, this is one part laying bare to two parts whistleblowing: actorly acknowledgement that some part of wanting it all may in fact be wanting not to be adored, a desire to escape the beautician appointments and designer duds and be treated like an employee, to be approached not as a goddess, but seen - really seen - as a real woman with real desires that need satisfying. The question is how, and here Reijn begins to reveal the film's serious intent: to figure out where the boundaries might be in the wake of all things #MeToo. Romy straightens herself out - by employing Samuel to straighten her out - only to walk, newly relaxed, into a whole other set of complications, not least how to get this liberating fling past HR. Which is where Babygirl begins to get properly funny - funnier, indeed, than Reijn's previous Bodies Bodies Bodies, which squandered its cast of emergent American comedians on utterly disposable material.

One way of approaching the new film is as a revision of Eyes Wide Shut (maybe even The Piano Teacher?) with Kidman recast as the uptight lead. Getting Romy out of her comfort zone entails days and nights in the grottiest hotels in existence (what an intern's stipend gets you, presumably); it also allows Reijn to contrast the fathomless complexity of female sexuality - these panties get in such a knot - with the relative simplicity of male desire. In several places, Babygirl appears to flirt with an anti-feminist reading: on some level, what it implies is that some women are wild animals who need training by boys who keep cookies in their pockets for that very purpose. Yet even that's been framed within the context that sexuality is an odd fucking thing for any of us to have to get our heads around, and that we'd do well to approach the task with compassion, humour and patience. The writing has one obvious limitation: the Dickinson character is not much better defined than a plot device, being the key to unlocking and unblocking this woman. (We never fully shake off our suspicions that if a real intern behaved like this, he'd be clearing his locker in a heartbeat.) But he's crucial to the dynamic Reijn is fostering here. If the hotel scenes occasionally assume the look of an actors' exercise - and Reijn surely intends some parallel between these power games and the production Romy's husband is seen rehearsing - these actors visibly benefit from having been directed by someone who's been in their position before: we're set to watching two people feeling one another out in compelling ways, and a director taking supreme care to protect her performers from indignity or foolishness. Part of the mainstream's recent terror of sex has been a fear of how to film sex: how do you observe these physicalities while avoiding crossing any lines with regard to taste, decency or consent? Fashioned by a Dutchwoman - as liberated as Verhoeven, if evidently not as male in the gaze - Babygirl provides one model for future explorations; whether or not you find it sexy will be a matter of personal preference, but the framing is always warm and inviting - it's attractive filmmaking - and it'd be one heck of a conversation starter if arrived at as a date movie. My brain, at least, was stimulated - and I'll take that from any movie on general release.

Babygirl is now playing in cinemas nationwide.