
Director Halina Reijn’s ‘Babygirl’ was released in UK cinemas on the 10th of January, and like many, I was excited to see it. The film had been released earlier in America so I had already seen a lot of hype surrounding the film, plus it had an interesting concept so I had already gotten my hopes up a bit.
But unfortunately, I didn’t love it. I won’t sit here and slander the film because there are elements I can appreciate such as the soundtrack as well as some of the shots and scenes but a lot of it fell flat for me.
One of my main issues with the film was its plot, without spoilers, the film’s premise is that a high-powered CEO puts her family and career on the line by involving herself in a torrid affair with a younger intern at the company and was marketed as an erotic thriller, although there isn’t anything particularly thrilling about it. The storyline was disjointed, it jumped right into the affair and glossed over anything else that could be considered important. The impact it had on her family was confined to a few scenes where everyone acted like it actually wasn’t that big of a deal with the same happening on the career side as well. It felt like all the elements that could’ve made this an interesting and enjoyable film were left out, which actually meant some parts of this film were just a bit boring.
I would have also liked to have seen more of Esther Rose Mcgregors character as I think she played the role excellently and could have moved the story forward far more if we had gotten some more of the family scenes.
Controversially, my other issue is that I didn’t think the leads had much chemistry, both Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson are good actors but being in the audience I just couldn’t sense anything there at all; which makes sense when you find out there wasn’t a chemistry test done for this film. It just made what should’ve been the high energy points of the film, fall flat.
Don’t let this review sway you however, as I have seen so many people absolutely love this film, but for my friends and I, it just didnt hit like we thought it would. Which was disappointing because I was really looking forward to it.
You can watch the Babygirl trailer here:
follow me on letterboxd