Insatiable drives come in all shapes and sizes. One of the more familiar types is announced by the loud sex noises Nicole Kidman is called upon to make at the start of Babygirl, though at first we only hear them, accompanied by a black screen. The shock value gets twisted a bit when (now visible), she returns a somewhat apathetic “I love you” to her partner, watches him fall asleep, then promptly runs to the next room to watch internet porn so she can “finish.”
Later, in fact, we discover her character has never been able to have an orgasm with her husband. While there’s no accounting for taste, or chemistry, this is sort of a funny idea—because her husband is played by Antonio Banderas, who’s been considered by many the ultimate in male desirability for a few decades now, and can still make some knees go weak at age 64. Then again, it’s hardly the most ludicrous idea we’ve been asked to swallow at the movies in 2024.
Kidman plays Romy Mathis, CEO of a company at the forefront of creating robotics to do most of the labor at giant shipping warehouses for companies like Amazon. In other words, she’s in the business of putting actual people out of jobs… something you’d expect to be included here because the film will say something meaningful about it.
It never does, though. Instead, the focus remains on our heroine’s libido, which is not being satisfied at home, where she and theater-director spouse Jacob (Banderas) are raising two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor, Vaughan Reilly). It perks right up, however, at a first glimpse of Samuel (Harris Dickinson from Triangle of Sadness) managing to calm a runaway dog attacking a pedestrian on the sidewalk outside Romy’s corporate HQ. “How masterful!,” you can almost hear her thinking. Then it turns out Samuel is among the new crop of interns being trained and utilized by her own subordinates. How convenient.
Needless to say, Romy cannot help being curious about this assertive young man perhaps half her age. We soon realize he is not the type for whom such covert signals will go unreceived. In fact, he is precociously bossy… and his new boss has subjugation fantasies he wastes little time in sussing, then pushing towards realization. She has everything to lose, not just in terms of the relationship’s inappropriateness, but in cheating on an adoring husband. Still, it’s all vicariously thrilling so long as it stays their little secret. Unfortunately for her, Samuel is well aware that he has the upper hand, eventually pushing things towards a cliff in ways that makes you wonder if he was plotting her downfall all along.
Well, that’s another thing that turns out to be a red herring in Dutch actor turned writer-director Halina Reijin’s script, which presents itself as something more elevated and less of a trashy genre piece than the 1990s-style erotic thrillers it recalls. Yet its content doesn’t really turn out to be any weightier than those lurid potboilers, albeit without their usual murder angle. Samuel lectures his mistress/minion on power and consent even as he’s more or less blackmailing her, meanwhile keeping her in such a steamy state such that she proves a pretty easy mark.
A talented young English actor who’s been cast as a male sexual object several times already, Dickinson is good as usual, but he’s playing a figure not that far removed from the hurts-so-good hero in the 50 Shades movies. (Or the ones in older upscale S&M fantasies like Secretary and The Story of O.) Of course the difference here is that this time the female sub is also her dom’s workplace superior. That’s an irony not quite rich in itself to build an entire two-hour movie on, though Nicole Kidman does eke mileage aplenty from Romy’s warring instincts—to flex the boss-lady authority that got her this far, and to let this upstart run roughshod over it.
The daring in her performance peaks in a sequence where she’s face-down on a hotel room carpet, letting Samuel do something or other to her just out of sight. She responds with involuntary, animalistic excitement, the effect funny and embarrassing—how often do we get to see people onscreen (even in porn) look/behave like they’re actually losing control during sex? But equally admirable is a bit where Romy, suddenly nervous about her appearance around New Guy, gets botox injections… which one of her daughters then mercilessly ridicules.
Given that 57-year-old Kidman is a frequent target of criticism for just such assumed age-resistance procedures, some sort of Good Sport Hall of Fame status should be awarded for being willing to laugh at herself. (If only The Substance had such a moment, suspending its own titanic self-importance on the subject of female body image and aging.)
Babygirl also tosses in brief address of women supporting other women in climbing a still overwhelmingly male corporate ladder, via the Sophie Wilde’s character as the heroine’s assistant. But for all its cool stylistic control and star power, this film really doesn’t add up to much more than another “torrid forbidden affair” melodrama in the realm of 9 1/2 Weeks or Unfaithful. Babygirl finally has so little to say, it ought to have cut loose and had a little more fun saying it.
Possibly the all-time most popular model for insatiability—albeit of a veiled, not-exactly-overtly-sexual kind—is Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, a construct so compelling it almost singlehandedly created a “sexy vampire” trope our culture is still swimming in 127 years later. When F.W. Murnau made the original Nosferatu in 1922 Germany, he stuck closely to the novel’s model, though without actually securing the necessary rights from Stoker’s estate. In the long run, the film survived as a world cinema classic, but at the time, lawsuits nearly erased it from screen history. In 1979 Werner Herzog put his own stamp on both the author and Murnau’s visions with Nosferatu the Vampyre, a gorgeous if sometimes silly remake. Though largely reduced to near-stasis, like posed mannequins within exquisite tableaux, that version’s leads Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani nonetheless made memorable impressions.
One misses their force of personality in Robert Eggers’ new Nosferatu, which nonetheless for an hour or so is the most aesthetically enveloping exercise in Gothic horror we’ve had for aeons. Here, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is a newlywed in a German town of about 200 years ago, eager to make enough money so that he and wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) can start their bourgeois life together properly. Ergo he’s in no position to refuse when his employer (Simon McBurney as a real estate salesman who doubles as the “Renfield”) sends him on a mysterious mission to deliver a property purchase deed to an “eccentric aristocrat” in the Carpathian Alps.
Nearing his destination, Thomas gets all kinds of warning signals—corny ones right out of the old Universal Pictures playbook, like mocking gypsies and fretful innkeepers. Upon arrival, he is received by Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), a cadaverous figure with breath like a death rattle, claw-like hands, and speech like a doom metal vocalist’s croak. It soon becomes apparent that he is a prisoner here, his blood feeding the host who’ll then travel to lay siege to the human society Thomas left behind. His distraught wife, long beset by frightening premonitions of just such misfortune, now goes almost mad with terror under the roof of wealthy friends played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin.
So far, so good: That first hour is magnificently atmospheric, a triumph of top-shelf design collaborators working their magic on themes that are usually treated far less thoughtfully. But eventually it feels like Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) is hemmed in by the constraints of a well-known story, despite his screenplay’s added wrinkles. The real problem is that he’s powerfully attracted to the horror elements, which are very well realized…but then seems compelled to shoehorn in a “doomed love” aspect that lacks conviction, or even purpose.
That path has certainly been taken before—there have been lots of sexy-scary Count Draculas, and Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula took Gothic romanticism to a gaga extreme. But nothing has prepared us to see this Orlok as anything but a hideous, predatory embodiment of death; Skarsgard is as buried under transformative makeup and prosthetics as he is playing Pennywise in the It films. Lily-Rose Depp, meanwhile, is just sort of a dud. Perhaps she just hasn’t had the right role yet. But at this point, it’s hard to explain her casting outside the realms of superstar-parent nepotism—she lacks presence and technique, leaving a hole in the film’s center.
The Renfield aside, only Willem Dafoe is allowed to have any sense of humor about the goings-on here, his Van Helsing substitute appearing late to provide a few small lifts of energy. By that point, however, Nosferatu has begun to let down its high early promise, when it looked like it might just be the best Dracula-adjacent movie ever. Suspense slackens once Orlok arrives in Germany. When the Count finally has a long, pedestrian face-to-face dialogue with Ellen (who chides “You cannot love,” despite her own fated pull towards him), all remaining mystery and dread goes limp. Though it has duly wowed some, Nosferatu ultimately struck me as arguably the year’s most impeccably crafted disappointment.
On the other end, doing something pretty ordinary—the based-on-a-true-story inspirational underdog sports drama—better than you’d have anticipated is The Fire Inside. A first directorial feature from Rachel Morrison, previously known as a cinematographer (Seberg, Black Panther, Mudbound, Fruitvale Station), it’s a straightforward but cliche-resistant account of boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields’ driven struggle to get to the Olympics, twice—and her continued struggle afterwards, despite having won the gold medal each time.
Played by Ryan Destiny (who’s from Detroit), that heroine is introduced as a child in 2006 Flint, MI, where she pushes her way into a gym. The skeptical resident trainer, Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry), doesn’t even take on girls—but after she spars a noxious boy into a corner, he agrees to take this one. Five years later, at 16, she’s a disciplined athlete, no doubt in large part to escape a chaotic home life. When she slugs one of her irresponsible mother’s (Olunike Adeliyi) beaus for inappropriate behavior, mom throws her out. Claressa has nowhere to go but her coach’s house, where she is welcomed by him and his family.
But these are working-class African Americans from a famously beleaguered town. She, in particular, is a butch teen with anger issues and no interest in “dressing up,” who doesn’t see why she can’t answer a reporter’s inevitable question (about choosing a “men’s sport”) with “I like to hit people.” These are not qualities that appeal to the marketing types who sign star athletes to lucrative endorsement deals on behalf of high-profile brands. T-Rex has done all the hard work required to earn those offers. Still, she finds herself shut out of them—a winner, but broke. The frustration begins to drive a wedge between her and the only person who’s believed in her all along: Coach, who also never made a dime en route to that Olympic gold.
Scripted by Barry Jenkins, The Fire Inside balances that somewhat bitter gist with more conventionally rousing elements, buoyed throughout by fine performances in roles that are allowed more than one dimension. Henry is excellent as usual. This isn’t the most original or exciting movie in the world, but it’s one sports drama that provides an (eventually) uplifting success story while making it very clear that the road getting there is by no means an unbiased meritocracy.
Babygirl, Nosferatu, The Fire Inside all open in Bay Area theaters on December 25.
