Just like all human beings, writer-director Halina Reijn had fantasies; longings that she used to be embarrassed about.
Wrapped up in a cozy robe near the end of a tiring day, she’s loose and chipper as she joins ELLE.com over Zoom, reflecting on those inner conflicts. “I’m a feminist! I’m a career woman!” she says, with purposely exaggerated enthusiasm. “But I’m still very sensitive when a dominant man enters my space. [If] some guy walks up to me and says, ‘Hey, you’re going to come with me.’ I’d be like, ‘Okay!’” she adds, voicing that last part with an amusingly obedient tone and a cheeky chuckle.
Instead of hiding from such contrasts we all conceal within ourselves, Reijn decided to do what an audacious artist does, and poured them into Babygirl, her third narrative feature as a writer-director, on the heels of a long acting career that started in the early ’90s. Starring Nicole Kidman as a powerful New York CEO, the successful and happily married Romy, and Harris Dickinson as the newbie intern Samuel, Babygirl follows the duo as they embark on a risky affair, through which Romy finally experiments with her long-buried sexual desires. In the beginning of the film, we see her having sex with her husband (Antonio Banderas), moaning a fake orgasm while on top. But turns out, that isn’t what she wants at all—Romy is submissive in bed and Samuel somehow sniffs that from her as early as their first meeting, despite Romy’s imposing stance in an intimidatingly proper wardrobe.
Reijn’s starting point with the story was a simple question: Is it possible to love all the different layers of oneself? To her, that conundrum will resonate with women especially. “We are conditioned to please and we look at ourselves from the perspective of other people,” she explains. “We are often not at ease with our desires. If we have sexual agency, we might be considered too free. We slut-shame each other. So we have some nervousness around it. Babygirl is like a letter to myself. I hope that [by] better integrating with these different parts of myself, I can become a better feminist.”
Her mission eventually led her to what she calls “a fable and a comedy of manners” that plays with metaphors around what it takes for a woman to live a full life, and the dangers of being dishonest with oneself. Leaning into those perils places Babygirl in erotic thriller territory, a sadly under-explored subgenre these days, but one that Reijn is deeply fond of. “The erotic thriller I love the most is 9 1/2 Weeks,” she gushes, about the Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke-starrer whose playful kinkiness is felt in Babygirl’s DNA. “But I’m also a fan of Indecent Proposal and Fatal Attraction. Erotic thrillers don’t always age well, but I still love them.”
It’s through that affection that Reijn puts her spin on the genre, twisting it on her own terms, and reshaping it for the modern, post-MeToo world. “I’m in love with genre bending,” she says. “I like to stimulate people to bring their own imagination [into a story] by using tropes and cliches.” In a way, that’s exactly what Reijn did with her sophomore feature, Bodies Bodies Bodies, which put her sophisticated directorial chops on the map. “We have this structure of a classical horror movie—there’s a killer and everybody ends up dead. But in the end, there was no killer,” she says of the 2022 film. “It was all about group behavior and toxic friendships. It’s a tragic event, but it’s also very funny to me.” She approached Babygirl through a similar lens, ensuring that she’s in conversation with the sexual thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s that gave her a safe feeling (“Oh, I'm not alone with my kink!”), but were dated due to their habitual embracing of the male gaze. “I play with the tropes and seduce the audience to come into this super sexual and sensual world that they think they know. ‘Here’s this young, dangerous guy. And Romy is going to be punished for cheating.’ But in the end we say, ‘No, everybody’s human and ambiguous. And everybody has an animal inside them.’”
It was thanks to her first feature, Instinct, that Reijn entered Nicole Kidman’s orbit—the star approached the filmmaker, wanting to collaborate on a project together. “This is really something I want to emphasize,” says Reijn in praise of Kidman, who doesn’t only say she wants to support other women, but actually does. “She finds the smallest movies in the smallest corners of the world. And she found my little Dutch movie and said, ‘I want to work with you.’ I worked on a project for her, but after Bodies, I just felt very convinced that I had to write something completely myself, about a woman liberating herself. Nicole read a very early draft and immediately said, ‘I want to surrender to this and to your vision.’”
As Romy, Kidman does exactly that in Babygirl, giving a fearless performance of both vulnerability and strength. To Reijn, Kidman’s complete trust was the biggest gift. “She never dominates the narrative or goes, ‘I’m not going to do this, or I’m not going to do that.’ All those scenes were already written and she said, ‘I want to do all of that.’ We had a lot of very intimate conversations and connected on a very deep, soul level.’” Being an actor herself, Reijn proactively recognized that both Kidman and Dickinson would need to be in a supportive ecosystem. “I want them to feel safe and I’m not only talking about the intimacy scenes,” she remarks. “I’m also talking about emotional safety. It’s a collaborative experience like in the theater. We’re like a little theater ensemble.”
Among the more challenging intimacy scenes Reijn shot was Romy and Samuel’s first meeting in a cheap hotel room, a sequence where the duo explores their sexual dynamic for the first time. There is a performative ring to their exchanges, and that was very much on purpose. “They are both trying to claim power in the scene,” Reijn explains. “She walks in, fully dressed up in a designer outfit. She tells him off, he laughs at her. Exploring sexuality often feels like trying new things outside of your comfort zone. You almost don't believe yourself: ‘What am I saying?’ We wanted to show all that: the incredible vulnerability, but also the humor.”
For the scene, Reijn created a sheltered atmosphere by building a set in a studio that she could control completely. “And it was clean,” she adds proudly. “Even though it looks dirty with stains on the carpet, I wanted everything to be clean and soft. Those are things people don't think about. But how often I have crawled over floors in my acting career that were so dirty and gross…” Reijn also worked in long takes, making sure that only her director of photography (DP) Jasper Wolf was in the room with the actors while she watched on a monitor outside. Lighting and sound-related concerns were pre-addressed in order not to interrupt the natural flow of the scene. “That creates an intimacy. We choreographed it very, very clearly so that in the moment, they could let go and react to each other. That’s how you create electricity and risk in a very safe way.”
Reijn is grateful to have had an intimacy coordinator on set, Lizzy Talbot. “A good intimacy coordinator is like a good stunt coordinator. As an actress, I have felt so embarrassed. I have felt so much shame and awkwardness,” she recalls of filming sex scenes. “I was 16. I was still a virgin and I had to play in an episode of a TV show that I had sex with someone. I remember the male director just saying, ‘Okay, let’s go for it.’ That’s all he said. I didn’t even know what kind of movements belonged to that. I wish we had [intimacy coordinators] before.”
To align the film’s visual language with her feminist intentions, the filmmaker extensively pondered the notion of female gaze, and how a woman might even look at herself without being brainwashed by the way patriarchy sees us. “When I look in the mirror, I honestly probably look at myself through male eyes,” Reijn confesses. “If I looked at myself with female eyes, I would probably not get rid of my nipple hairs. I would think, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful little fur that I’m growing there.’” Her guiding voice in filming the female body was once again informed by her own experience as an actress, often feeling objectified and sexualized through voyeuristic eyes. “I told my DP, a straight man, to put himself in my shoes and really try and think about what it [might feel like] to be a woman. I think for us women, sexuality has nothing to do with the actual sex act sometimes. If you look closely at my movie, we have little snippets of the actual sex acts, but it’s mostly suggestion. It’s all in the mind. For us women, it’s poetic, layered, nuanced. And that is how I wanted to use the camera.”
Even as an erotic-thriller-loving cinephile in her late forties, Reijn is sympathetic towards the younger generation who might be shy about eroticism in cinema, or (as it’s often argued across social media), apprehensive towards sex scenes in movies. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” she admits. “And I have a couple of ideas. I grew up without the [cell] phone. When you grow up with a phone, you’re just used to communicating through a device. So anything that has to do with smell, touching, bodily juices…it’s a little gross. Almost too human.” She adds, “When we were young, it was so much effort to even look at a sexual picture. Now with the internet, it's perhaps too much for them—press one button and they see the most insane and sometimes horrible images of sexuality. So I relate to them saying, ‘I don’t need that.’”
To Reijn, our entrapment in patriarchy also contributes to younger viewers’ hesitation. She says patriarchy breeds a very specific type of sexuality onscreen—too in-your-face, stripping sex off all its mystery. “I’m convinced that those young people that are scared of it will be able to enjoy this movie because it leaves things up to your own imagination. And [I try to] give you enough tools to play with it in your head.”
