By Sonia Nair. ABC Entertainment. Topic: Thriller Films. Supplied: A She's making all the right sounds, but as soon as it's over and Jacob has descended into a post-coital stupor, Romy steals away to watch porn on her laptop and pleasure herself.
She didn't orgasm with Jacob and, it turns out, never has. The film cuts almost immediately from the intimate space of the home and its entombed secrets to the sterility of a warehouse. Romy is the CEO of a robotics company that trades in a rote automisation replicated in her characterisation. Perennially put-together and guarded with nary a tendril of hair askew, Romy pursues perfection in every realm of her life, meticulously assembling lunch boxes with hand-written notes for her two daughters as seamlessly as she spouts meaningless corporate nothings in promotional videos and undergoes periodic botox injections.
There's a touch of Severance in the world-building of Babygirl. Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn nails the humdrum details of everyday office life, from the insipid office small talk to Romy's swapping of pragmatic runners for teetering heels as soon as she steps into her office. But Romy's aloof detachment starts to come undone with the arrival of a new intern, Samuel Harris Dickinson , who is nearly 30 years her junior.
Confident and impetuous, bordering on rude, Sam intuitively guesses what Romy wants from him, and the chemistry between them is palpable. So begins an affair conducted within the privacy of hotel rooms, in the obscured nooks and crannies of their office. There's a clear power differential in an illicit relationship between a CEO and an intern, but Sam signals early on that he holds all the cards in this affair, subverting the dynamic from the outset. Not only is Sam the dom to Romy's sub, but he also warns her that he could easily dismantle her professional and personal life if he were to go public with their affair.
Romy is keenly aware of this dynamic β it's what imbues their escalating liaison with the electricity and sexual charge that's so sorely missing in her own marriage. That, and his commands for her to lap milk from a saucer, prostrate on all fours in an impossibly tight pencil skirt, and skulk in the naughty corner like a child being disciplined. Babygirl is less sexually explicit than its trailer suggests.
