114 min | R | December 25, 2024 | A24
Nicole Kidman plays a CEO who starts an affair with a young intern. Halina Reijn directs an erotic thriller that is actually erotic and actually thrilling. Kidman is fearless.
Romy is the CEO of a tech company. She has a loving husband. She has two daughters. She has power and status and control over every aspect of her life. Samuel is a young intern at her company. He sees something in her. He sees that her control is a cage. He offers her submission. She accepts. The affair is not about love or even attraction in any conventional sense. It is about a woman who has spent her entire career performing authority and discovers that what she wants is to surrender it. Halina Reijn writes and directs an erotic thriller that takes female desire seriously. The power dynamics are explicit. The sexuality is frank. The film does not apologize for any of it.
Nicole Kidman plays Romy with a precision that makes the character’s unraveling devastating. She is composed in boardrooms and desperate in hotel rooms and Kidman makes both versions of the woman feel equally real. The physical performance is extraordinary. Kidman communicates shame and arousal and confusion through micro-expressions that lesser actors could not achieve. She is fifty-seven years old and plays a woman whose sexuality is the center of the film and she does it without vanity. Harris Dickinson plays Samuel with a quiet confidence that borders on menace. He is young and beautiful and he understands power better than he should. The dynamic between them is electric and uncomfortable. Antonio Banderas plays Romy’s husband Jacob with a warmth that makes the betrayal sting. Sophie Wilde plays an assistant whose presence adds another layer of tension.
Reijn directed Bodies Bodies Bodies and brings the same clinical eye to very different material. The cinematography by Jasper Wolf uses corporate spaces as erotic environments. The glass offices and conference rooms become stages for a private drama. The color palette is cool and controlled in public scenes and warmer in the intimate ones. The sound design heightens the physicality. The score creates tension through restraint. Reijn shoots the sex scenes with a directness that European cinema handles better than American cinema typically does. The camera observes without leering. The editing is precise and knows when to cut and when to hold.
The film is a provocation and it knows it. A powerful woman choosing submission. A young man wielding sexual authority over his boss. The power dynamics are deliberately uncomfortable. Reijn does not resolve the discomfort. She sits in it. The film argues that desire is not rational and does not respect the hierarchies we build to contain it. Romy’s affair is reckless and selfish and the film does not pretend otherwise. But Reijn insists that understanding desire requires looking at it directly. Kidman’s performance makes that insistence feel necessary rather than sensational. This is a film about what a woman wants when she stops performing what she is supposed to want.