Two films, two women, two alluring yet problematic men. It’s Babyratu, baby!
The cultural phenomenon of Barbenheimer was born when two wildly different films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, were released on the same day. It was credited with singlehandedly reviving the flagging state of cinema in 2023.
Babyratu, a portmanteau of Babygirl and Nosferatu that sounds as cute and disgusting as skulling a glass of full-fat milk sent to you by an intern, hasn’t quite taken off in the same way. Still, both were released on Christmas day in the US, and both have contributed to the unholy terror that is the continuing discourse about the return of “horny”, a crime I am guilty of committing myself. There’s been enough online chatter about their similarities and competition for the prize of “most erotic” that this reviewer decided to watch both in quick succession.
It’s increasingly difficult to separate some films from the hype generated by the priming of audiences via a slow release of clips and savvy attunement by film distributors and marketers to social media virality. If you swam in certain waters online over the summer, Babygirl was dripping wet with memetic hype well before its release in New Zealand on January 30. At the preview screening I attended, most of the audience was already highly responsive to what mentions of milk, cookies, interns, and George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ meant.
Hype is a double-edged sword. It’s increasingly necessary; the profitability of cinematic releases is hanging onto the edge of a cliff by its fingernails as streaming birds of prey swarm, trying to peck out its eyes. It also unfairly prejudices people against films, hobbles a director’s intentions, creates expectations that critics love to tear down, and, if you’re viewing communally, the discomfort of not knowing if you’re reacting correctly. People are laughing during films like Babygirl, Nosferatu, Anora and Queer, raising questions about etiquette in a post-pandemic social media age and our capacity to deal with ambiguity, especially when it comes to sex.
I laughed once during Babygirl, right at the end, due to a clever sound design choice that suggests the film could just as easily be called “Bitch”. People around me laughed a lot more at multiple moments. Don’t get me wrong, Babygirl’s dialogue, performances, and now infamous scenes are deliberately, ironically and wickedly funny in parts, an intention acknowledged by director Halina Reijn. Sometimes though, it was difficult to escape the feeling that I was watching six memes, reactions pre-primed, strung together by Nicole Kidman’s performance and a banging original soundtrack by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the composer responsible for the unsettling, discordant and moreish title track from the first season of The White Lotus.
Kidman comes with bags of hype herself. Her work ethic, camp AMC promo and regular run-ins with bad costume wigs and red carpet press packs, inspired someone to recently tweet: ” She is incapable of not becoming a meme.”
Fortunately, Kidman transcends the hype in Babygirl, disappearing into the role of Romy, a married CEO of a whizzy robotics company who begins a sexual relationship with intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson). Kidman sometimes doesn’t manage that, a curse of being so productive that it feels like you’re only ever watching Nicole Kidman and not the character she’s portraying.
One of Kidman’s specialities is having a carefully crafted and tightly laced outer layer undone by circumstance or her character’s worst instincts. In Babygirl, the initial impression is that her undoing stems from marital sexual dissatisfaction. She fakes an orgasm in the opening scene during sex with her husband. Believing that, when her husband, Jacob, is played by Antonio Banderas, and she’s had 19 years to communicate what she needs, initially requires a gargantuan appetite for suspending disbelief. She leaves the marital bed to masturbate to porn.
Another trope replaces that theory after her first interaction with Dickinson. As a woman in charge, she has sexual proclivities that stem from being in control most of the time. They step into what starts as a fairly vanilla sub/dom relationship, with the promise of exploring issues of trust and power dynamics, before it wildly spirals into something else.
I suspect I didn’t laugh as much as others at times because I was so deeply frustrated by the two lead characters who seemed to dig holes and fill them in, only to dig them deeper the next time. Samuel, as a character, isn’t wholly formed. There’s a hint of something a bit broken and insecure about him beneath the “socially awkward, sexy and a class below Romy” schtick, but it stays pretty buried.
Romy’s driving forces — her sexual preferences, apparent desire to have it all and her inclination towards self-sabotage — are conflated. Her upbringing in “cults and communes” is barely mentioned, and it feels like it should be. She seems to be engaging in regular eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing therapy, a recommended treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet, she waves away her childhood in a conversation with Jacob, instead defensively and manipulatively telling him she was born with “dark thoughts and dark fantasies”.
Refreshingly, and without giving too much away, the film is perhaps positing something about cancel culture, but it’s still hard to imagine a similar end for a film about a man who does what Romy does. Despite claiming she needs “something at stake”, spending most of the film inching towards a dangerous blowing up of her life, the film’s ending suggests something entirely different.
Despite the mess of character motivations and wild oscillation between sexual fantasy fulfilment, gender and power dynamics and what ultimately seems like two broken people being broken with each other, Reijn, who wrote and directed the film, is trying to say a lot, and most of it is interesting. I both loved and hated the film while watching it. I am still thinking about it, and not because of the milk, the ‘Father Figure’ dance or the sex.
The sex scenes are ultimately fairly tepid, and the stakes aren’t that high. In an interview with Letterboxd, Kidman cites The Piano Teacher as one of her four favourite films and while I could see a through-line from that film and others, like the Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke erotic drama 9½ Weeks, there is far more thrilling and erotic transgression in those films than in Babygirl.
In fact, calling Babygirl an erotic thriller feels like lousy labelling. Yes, there are erotic moments, thrills and shocks, but ultimately, calling it an erotic drama or even erotic comedy might be more accurate.
If you’ve ever stepped outside of an airconditioned airport into a very humid city, headlong into a wall of heat, you can begin to imagine what exiting a screening of Babygirl is like. “I looooooooved it”, one woman excitedly breathed at a friend as they clutched hands. See the film for that feeling and because it’s interesting. Whether you laugh or not, sitting together feeling weird is much healthier than scrolling through endless videos of people attempting to mimic Dickinson’s sexy, hunched-over dancing to a George Michael classic.
I did not emerge from the cinema flushed and hot after Nosferatu. I emerged with a chill, and a husband who wasn’t sure what he’d seen or why I’d taken him.
I knew far less about Nosrefatu beyond the legend and the canon of Dracula literature and film that preceded director Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake. The only baggage I took in was a hope that Lily-Rose Depp might be offered some redemption after suffering through the utterly awful HBO show The Idol.
Depp stars as Ellen, a young woman living in Germany in the 1830s caught in the middle of the well-known love triangle between the man she loves and the older, depraved and physically repugnant monster who consumes her. She is suitably wide-eyed and tortured for the role of a woman running desperately from her worst desires, possessed by a longing for Count Orlok since accidentally summoning him in her youth. Her saviour and respite from the nightmarish prison of her own body and soul arrive in the form of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a man trying to make his name and with whom she has a loving and “safe” marriage.
In trying to make his name, Hoult sets out on a journey that he very clearly should not continue once he arrives at the gates of Orlok’s castle, and yet he does. Orlok triumphs over him and begins his plagued takeover of Ellen and the town where many unfortunate, and soon to be dead, people dwell. Men unite to kill the vampire, and ultimately, Ellen trumps them all.
Depp is genuinely great in this film, and while her writhing and backbends do conjure some camp allusions to The Exorcist, prompting the aforementioned laughter in cinemas, she is physically committed, both strong and vulnerable at the same time.
Eggers is famously known for his skill as a director at world-building, and Nosferatu is no exception. It’s not just the period detail in costume and set but the way the characters speak. It’s initially alienating to hear them speak with the odd rhythms and expressions of the time, but in a highly stylised film, it’s no small feat that you grow used to them quickly, sinking into the immersive darkness Eggers creates.
The true star of the film and the root of questions about just how transgressively erotic it is (and the source of my post-film chill) is Bill Skarsgård. Skarsgård has always been adept at disappearing into his most frightening characters. His Pennywise is magnificent. As Count Orlok, perhaps the most monstrous iteration of Orlok to date, he manages to be repulsive, fearsome, charismatic and sexually magnetic. He brings the eternal lure of the monster to life, prompting you to ask whether it’s possible to be simultaneously nauseated, frightened and seduced. Are you a freaky little freak with dark enough thoughts and dark enough fantasies to find him as irresistible as Ellen? It’s a question the legend of Nosferatu has been posing for over a century, and Egger’s contribution to the canon might be the darkest, most evocative and confronting yet.