Babygirl

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Nicole Kidman as the all-powerful CEO of a New York robotics company who gets involved in submissive games with a brazen intern, putting her career and family at risk... This sounds like a guilty pleasure, and that's exactly what it is.

Dutch Hollywood newcomer Halina Reijn, long an established director in her home country and now an international name thanks to the series Redlight, came up with this clever erotic drama and directs it with a top-notch cast in seductive lighting. Kidman plays Romy, a model corporate boss with a model family consisting of a theater director (Antonio Banderas) and two teenage daughters, but she misses the excitement with her overly affable husband and secretly masturbates to porn in which men slap women's buttocks. A similar desire for submission arises when Romy encounters an insolent and outrageously attractive intern at work, played with unbeatable smugness by Harris Dickinson, the model from Triangle of Sadness. The young buck lectures his boss, who is thirty years his senior, while fetching coffee and, with his impudence, takes the lead when the clothes come off.

It takes not only the boldness and enduring sex appeal, but also the acting skills of Nicole Kidman to turn this plotline into a dazzling game with danger, in which the power relations are constantly shifting. Dickinson's character remains vague, but the script always gives the snob sufficiently good reasons for his collected transgressions. All American, in the second half of the film, in which Romy temporarily loses all control over the affair, follows the classic puritanical dramaturgy of conflict resolution with confession, atonement, and forgiveness. In the final confession of her sexual fantasies, however, Romy never gets beyond a torrent of vague hints. If you were in the role of her husband or lover, you would have for ask for a more in-depth wish list.