The first time you meet Romy, you hear her before you see her, moaning in ecstasy as she sits astride her naked husband. The camera pans over her strawberry-blonde hair, her smooth forehead, her open mouth. A skilled aesthetician has clearly had a hand here, and so it’s hard to guess how old she is. Forty-five, maybe? Fifty? The moaning reaches a crescendo, and Romy collapses next to her husband, who tells her he loves her.
“I love you,” she says back.
And then, she climbs out of bed and skips quietly down the hall, sprawls on the floor with a laptop, and masturbates to pornography. Because that gasping orgasm you just saw? Much like her thick eyelashes and lovely, shapely lips, it’s entirely fake.
Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, is the protagonist of the new film Babygirl, which hit theaters in the last days of 2024. She’s a high-achieving, artfully injected, happily married mother of two, who spends her days managing the company she founded and her nights having intercourse she never enjoys—because what she wants, what she needs, is something her husband can’t give her. When she meets the man who can—the man who knows, somehow, that Romy “likes to be told what to do”—a steamy affair commences. His name is Samuel, he’s about 25 years old, and riskiest of all, he’s her intern.
“Do you want to lose everything?” he asks her.