Babygirl, and the Difference Between Surrender and Leverage

It is night in a New York apartment, and a woman has just made love with her husband of many years. She gets up, goes into another room, opens a laptop and, watching pornography, brings herself to the orgasm she has never once had with him. That is where Babygirl begins, and it is worth staying in that room for a moment before the plot arrives, because everything that follows is an attempt to get out of it.

Her name is Romy Mathis. She runs a company in New York that sells automation, and she is very good at it. She has a husband she loves, a theatre director called Jacob, two daughters, a house in the country and a building full of people who do what she says. What she does not have is anywhere in her life where the thing she wants in that other room is allowed to exist, except the other room.

Halina Reijn, who wrote and directed the film, opened her statement for its premiere at Venice with a sentence that describes that room exactly. All of us, she wrote, carry a little black box filled with taboo fantasies that we might never share with anyone. The laptop is Romy’s box. The film is about what happens when she opens it in front of somebody, and about who that somebody turns out to be.

He turns out to be an intern at her own company. At work she is his boss; in the game they begin to play, he is hers. This essay is about that crossing. Her want is not the problem. It is not a symptom, it is not a failure of feminism, and it does not need to be explained away. The problem is the room she finds for it: a game of surrender played on top of a real hierarchy that points the other way. Two powers running in opposite directions do not cancel each other out. They stack. Each person comes to hold something over the other, and what looks like mutual surrender becomes, scene by scene, mutual leverage.

Surrender, in the sense this Library has defended it, needs an exit that costs nothing. Leverage is an exit with a price on it. Arousal cannot tell the two apart, which is exactly why somebody has to.

The record first. Babygirl was written and directed by Halina Reijn and stars Nicole Kidman as Romy, Harris Dickinson as Samuel, Antonio Banderas as Jacob and Sophie Wilde as Esmée, Romy’s assistant. It premiered in competition at the Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2024, where Kidman won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. It opened in American cinemas on Christmas Day that year, and in Japan on 28 March 2025.

On her way to the office one morning, a loose dog lunges at Romy and a young man calms it. He is Samuel, one of the company’s new interns, and he picks her as his mentor. In their sessions he needles her about power, then begins to test hers, and it is she who kisses him. At a hotel she tells him what worries her: that she is the one abusing her position. His answer, which this essay will come back to, is that one phone call from him could get her fired. In that shabby room he takes the dominant role, and her orgasm is so strong that afterwards she sobs.

The affair deepens, and so does the pressure. Samuel turns up at the family’s country house to return a laptop and charms everyone; she orders him never to come again, and he threatens to ask for a transfer, which would raise questions. She tells Jacob that she has never had an orgasm with him, then begs Samuel to go on, and he takes her back once she confirms her submission. He arrives at her younger daughter’s birthday party with Esmée, whom he is dating. Esmée tells Romy she knows, and asks her to end it.

Romy confesses to Jacob, calling the affair a one-night stand with a stranger, and when she tries to tell him what she needs, he is too hurt to hear it. At the country house he finds her with Samuel, and the two men fight. When Jacob calls female masochism a neurosis, Samuel tells him the idea is dated; Jacob has a panic attack, and it is Samuel who holds him until it passes. Then Samuel leaves, and takes a job in Japan. Encouraged by her elder daughter, Isabel, Romy goes back to Jacob and apologises, at his theatre, for never having said what she wanted. A board member hints that he knows about the affair and invites her to his house; she tells him she is not afraid of him and orders him out. At home, she and Jacob make love the way she has learned she wants, and she climaxes with him, picturing Samuel.

That is the whole film, ending included, and this essay discusses all of it. What is described here comes from the film’s published record and from reviews and interviews of record. It is described rather than quoted, and where those accounts disagree, the essay says so or says nothing.

Before the argument, her reasons. They deserve to be understood on their own terms first, because the usual ways of talking about a woman like Romy — as a cautionary tale, a case study, a punchline about powerful women — all skip this step, and the skipping is where the cruelty starts.

Consider what she has been doing in her own bed. Not refusing, not withholding, not lying for advantage: performing. For years she has given her husband the pleasure of believing that he pleases her, and she has done it out of something very close to love. To protect him. To protect a marriage that works in almost every other way. Perhaps to protect herself from a conversation she did not know how to begin. Faking is a competence. It is also a kindness, and it is a particular kind of loneliness, because it turns the most intimate thing in her life into a performance nobody knows is being given.

Now consider what she wants in the other room. Not, in the first instance, a man. She wants something to happen to her rather than be produced by her. To be told. To be handled by someone who is not afraid of her authority. Her company sells processes that behave exactly as instructed; in the other room, she wants to be the one who is instructed. There is nothing contradictory in that. Someone who holds everything up all day wanting, for once, to be held is as human as wanting gets.

There is a reason under that one. An earlier essay here, on competence at work and private desire, argued that for a woman whose standing has always rested on being able to justify what she does, a want with no justification has no licence, and that nobody else can issue one for her. Babygirl shows why it can feel as though somebody could. A command looks like a licence. If he tells her to, she does not have to authorise the want herself; someone else has taken the decision, and the want can simply happen. That is a real relief, and it is part of why the hotel room overwhelms her. It is also the flaw the rest of this essay is about, and it proves the earlier essay right by another route. A licence someone else issues is a licence someone else can withdraw, or put a price on.

When she sobs in that room, the film does not treat it as a breakdown, and neither should anyone else. It reads as years arriving at once. And when, much later, her husband calls what she wants a neurosis, the film gives the answer to the young man, who tells him the idea is dated. On that point this Library agrees without reservation. Wanting to be dominated is not a disorder, and nothing in this essay treats it as one. Reijn has said that the script was, for her, surrounded by shame. The shame was real. The want was never the thing that deserved it.

The most precise line in the film is the answer Samuel gives in the hotel room, and it is worth slowing down for, because the whole confusion of the film is folded inside it.

Romy, to her credit, raises the right worry. She is the chief executive and he is an intern, and she asks whether she is the one abusing her position. It is exactly the question a responsible person in her chair should ask, and she asks it at the right moment, before anything has happened. Samuel’s answer is that he is the one with the power: one phone call from him could get her fired.

Listen to what that sentence does. It is offered as reassurance: you are not exploiting me, so you may go ahead. But it is built as a threat. It answers a question about consent with a statement about leverage, as though the fact that each of them could now ruin the other made the arrangement fair. As though two hostages added up to two free people.

Reijn’s own statement for the festival describes the affair as a way for its two people to play out their confusion around power, gender, age and hierarchy. Confusion is the director’s word, and this is where the confusion is purest. It rests on an idea a great many people carry without examining it: that the capacity to harm is a kind of equality, and that equality is a kind of consent. Neither step holds. Being able to ruin someone does not make you free to refuse them. It means only that if either of you refuses, one of you may ruin the other.

So the line is not the moment the game becomes fair. It is the moment the game takes on a second set of stakes, real ones, which neither player can put down when the scene is over.

The easy reading of the film is that its hierarchies balance. By day she rules him and by night he rules her; the reversal is the erotic point and, somehow, the justice of it too. The powerful woman kneels, the young man at the bottom of the ladder commands, and the account is settled.

Draw the actual structure and it looks different. At work, she holds his future. An intern’s career is in the gift of the people above him, and she is at the top of those people; whatever he says to her, he says to someone who can end his prospects. In the game, by her invitation, he holds her will. And outside both, from the first night, he holds her secret, which is something that can end hers. Three lines of power, running in different directions, and not one of them cancels another. They stack.

Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, a 2002 film about a lawyer and the secretary he disciplines, shows the familiar version, in which the office ladder and the game’s ladder point the same way: the man who pays her is also the man who commands her. That arrangement has its own shadow, because an employee’s yes to her employer is never simply a yes, and it is the shadow most people have in mind when they worry about sex at work. Babygirl looks like the corrected version. Here the powerful one kneels. But turning one ladder upside down does not remove the other. It only means that each of them is now standing on a rung the other can kick away.

Nor does the crossing leave Samuel free. The film keeps his interior almost entirely closed, and this essay will not invent one for him. But his position is visible even where his motives are not. He is at the start of a career, in a company run by the woman he is sleeping with, and the film never shows him in a position to find out whether he could say no to her without cost. His pressure on her is pressure, and this essay will not soften it. Her power over him is power, and it will not soften that either. The honest description is that after the first kiss, neither of them is ever in a position to refuse the other for free.

That is the plainest way to state the care this film asks for. Desire does not erase a workplace imbalance. Her wanting to kneel does not make her any less his boss, and his wanting to command her does not make him any less her intern. Whatever else is in the room, those two facts are in it every time.

Consent is usually discussed as a question about the yes: whether it was given, whether it was clear, whether it was wholehearted. Babygirl is more useful than that, because it is almost entirely about the no, and about what it costs, in this arrangement, to say it.

This Library has argued elsewhere that wanting to surrender control is not the same as giving up choice, and that what separates chosen surrender from resignation is its edges: limits drawn in advance by the person handing over control, and a way to take it back. The film tests an assumption that argument could make without stating it, which is that the person who draws the edges can enforce them without being punished for doing so. Consider what happens each time Romy tries.

When she draws a line around her family and orders him never to come to the country house again, the answer is a threatened transfer request, which would bring questions to her door. Her no acquires a price, payable in scrutiny. When she tries to end it, finds that she cannot, and goes back to beg him to continue, he takes her back only once she has confirmed her submission; the terms of re-entry are his. And the game keeps walking into rooms that never invited it. At a work party, in front of her own employees, a waiter brings her a glass of milk that Samuel has ordered, and she drinks it. Then the country house. Then a child’s birthday party. A game without a room of its own becomes the weather of a whole life.

There is negotiation in this film, a good deal of it, and that is part of what makes it unusual. But look at the currency. Every term is priced in need or in threat. Nobody names a limit. Nobody agrees on a word that would stop things, or an hour at which they end. Set it beside Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, in which a widow who has never had an orgasm books a young sex worker and meets him in a hotel room. There, the edges are agreed before anyone walks in: a booked time, settled terms, working names, and a life on either side of the door that the room does not touch. Even so, that film is honest enough to show a line being crossed. Babygirl’s room has no edges at all. Both of them carry their real names and their real jobs into it, and both of them carry them out again.

None of this is changed by how much she wants him, and here the film asks for the plainest sentences in this essay. Arousal is not consent. Her orgasm in the hotel room is overwhelming and real, and it certifies nothing about the arrangement it happened in; a body that responds is reporting on itself, not on the room. Fantasy is not consent either. The screen she watched in the other room could not answer back. Samuel has a career, a temper and a phone.

The sequence also invites an old misreading, the one that says a woman’s no is only a yes she has not admitted yet: she forbids him, and later she begs. This essay refuses it. Her no was a no, and her later yes was a yes. Both were hers, and neither was free.

One more fact belongs here, because it is the argument in miniature. Reijn made the film with an intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot, and has said that just as you cannot shoot a fight without a stunt coordinator, it is the same with sex scenes. So a film about two people improvising a game with no agreed limits was made by people working inside a structure built for agreeing them. That is not a paradox. It is the whole distance between what the film shows and what it took to show it safely.

Consent between two people covers two people. The film keeps everyone else in view.

The most exposed of them is Esmée. She is Romy’s assistant, ambitious, dating Samuel, and at some point she works out that her boyfriend is sleeping with her boss. Think about where that leaves her. She is the least powerful person in the triangle, and she is the one who has to walk up to the most powerful and ask her to stop. Her argument is not jealousy. It is that few women reach jobs like Romy’s, and that Romy should be someone younger women can look up to.

Both halves of that deserve to be held at once. The plea is fair. A chief executive’s affair with an intern is not a private matter, because its costs fall on the people below her, and Esmée is one of them. And the plea is also a pressure of its own. It asks one woman’s private life to carry the prospects of other women, and drafts her desire into service as an example. That burden falls hardest on exactly the women who are rarest at the top, and the film puts it in the mouth of someone with every reason to resent the whole situation.

There is a colder point underneath. Once a game runs through an office, knowledge turns into leverage whether or not anyone means to use it. Esmée now knows what Samuel knows. By the end, so does a member of the board. Everyone who finds out holds something, and the circle of people holding something widens with each scene. That is what it means for a game to have no room of its own. It leaks, and whatever leaks becomes somebody else’s power.

And there is the family. Jacob learns the truth about his marriage in two blows, and his first response is a failure to listen that the film neither excuses nor punishes. His daughters’ home becomes a place where their mother’s lover turns up at a birthday party. It is the elder daughter who, in the end, sends her mother home. None of them agreed to any of it. They were simply in the rooms.

All through the film, Jacob is rehearsing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and one reviewer records him saying of his heroine that her life is already over. The choice is not decoration. Before she directed films, Reijn was an actor, above all on the stage, and she played Hedda herself, for Toneelgroep Amsterdam under Ivo van Hove, in a production first staged in 2006. She has said that the great roles she played, Hedda among them, all ended up dead, and she put it more bluntly in one interview: a woman who liberates herself, she said, does not really exist in the patriarchy, because she either dies or she ends up in a mental institution.

Recall how Hedda Gabler ends. Judge Brack knows something that could make a scandal of her, whose pistol was used, and he lets her understand what his silence will cost. Hedda sees that she will be in his power for good, and she ends her life rather than live inside it. The play was written in 1890 and first performed in Munich in 1891, and its engine is exactly the one this essay has been describing: a man who holds knowledge over a woman, and the price he sets on it.

Babygirl has a Brack. He arrives near the end, a member of her board, telling her that Samuel has gone to a job in Japan and asking whether she had anything to do with it. He lets her understand that he knows. Then he invites her to his house. It is leverage in its oldest form, knowledge and the threat of scandal and a price, and it is the first time in the film that the lever is held by a man with institutional power over her. The parallel with Ibsen is this essay’s reading; the film does not announce it. But the film has had the play in rehearsal in the background from the start, and this is the scene in which its ending is refused.

Romy tells him she is not afraid of him, and orders him out. Why can she? Part of the answer is that a lever needs a shame to pull on, and she has already set hers down where it weighed most: the husband it could have been carried to already knows. Part of it is that she is the chief executive, and the counter-reading below takes that seriously. But this is the scene Reijn built the film towards. Asked about the ending, she said that she did not want Romy to lose everything because she had cheated on her husband, and that she found it more human that the two of them would go back to each other, that he would forgive her, and that she would be able to forgive herself.

Then the last scene, which the film is careful not to tie up. At home, she and Jacob make love the way she has learned she wants, and she climaxes with him, picturing Samuel. What has moved into the marriage is the want, and the words for it; the image of the other man has come along too. This essay does not read that as a betrayal or as a failure. A fantasy is a fantasy, and a marriage that has learned to hold the truth about its own sex life can probably hold a face in the dark. What matters is the room. For the first time in the film, the want is somewhere stopping is free. She can say no to Jacob, and he can say no to her, and nobody loses a livelihood over it.

Babygirl opened in Japan in March 2025, and a viewer here arrives with a vocabulary for its office half that is worth setting beside the film.

Japanese workplace guidance on power harassment, in force since June 2020, turns on what it calls a superior relationship, and the striking thing is how it defines one. Not by job title but by likelihood: a relationship in which the person on the receiving end is highly likely to be unable to resist or refuse. Among its examples, next to conduct by someone higher in rank, it names conduct by colleagues or subordinates, where the work cannot go on without their knowledge or experience, or where they act as a group that is hard to resist. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, in other words, measures power the way this essay has been trying to: not by who stands above whom, but by who is able to say no.

The criminal law points the same way. Since July 2023 the offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse has been built around a state in which it is difficult to form, express or carry through the will not to consent, and it lists eight kinds of act or circumstance that can produce that state. One of them is being made to worry, or worrying, about disadvantage arising from the influence of someone’s economic or social position, and the Ministry of Justice explains that social relationships here include those at a company. The law gives a name to what the film dramatises: a yes spoken in the shadow of what someone could do to your livelihood. This essay applies no law to fictional people, and says nothing about what any court would make of anyone in the film.

Then there is the arithmetic behind Esmée’s plea. In 2025, according to the Cabinet Office’s white paper on gender equality, women made up 14.4 percent of people in managerial occupations in Japan, against roughly 30 percent or more in most of the countries it compares; in companies with a hundred or more regular employees, women held 9.3 percent of department-head posts. A woman in Romy’s chair here would be a symbol before she was a person, and the plea that she be someone younger women can look up to would land with more weight. So would its unfairness. If anything in this deserves anger, it is that arithmetic, which turns one woman’s private life into other women’s evidence. The anger does not belong to Esmée, and it does not belong to Romy.

For a woman working in Japan across a language, the crossing can be more literal than the film’s. Picture a manager who depends on a bilingual subordinate to read the meetings, draft the emails that matter and tell her what the room really thinks. She is in exactly the kind of crossed position the guidance describes: above on paper, dependent in practice. That makes nobody a harasser. It means that the price on the word stop can include the language itself.

And for a reader to whom some of this is not a film, because someone at work holds something over her, or because she has realised that she holds something over someone, there is no need to decide first whether it counts. Every prefectural labour bureau runs comprehensive labour consultation corners, which are also found in labour standards inspection offices across the country; they are free, need no appointment, take questions about harassment, and accept consultations in a range of languages. If what happened was sexual violence, the national number #8891 connects to the nearest one-stop support centre, and the call is free.

Four objections, and two of them land.

The first is the strongest, and it comes from the film’s own maker. This is an erotic film, and the danger is the point. Reijn’s statement for the festival describes it as an attempt to shine a light, without judgement, on the opposing forces inside a personality, and calls the joy of the affair’s exploration liberating, even healing. From there, an essay that brings the vocabulary of consent and workplace guidance to the film is reading a dream as a personnel file. The transgression is the genre, the pressure is part of the heat, and a viewer who found the film thrilling has done nothing that needs correcting. All of that should be granted. Fantasy on a screen needs no permission slip, and neither does the viewer who enjoys it. The claim here is narrower. It is not that the film should have been safer. It is that its arrangement should not be mistaken for the only home the want can have, and it is the film itself, not this essay, that makes every scene turn on who could ruin whom.

The second is sharper, and aimed at the office itself. Perhaps the workplace is not the wrong room for this want but the only room in which it means anything. Romy’s authority lives at work, and a reversal staged anywhere else would reverse nothing. That is a serious point, and this essay cannot dismiss it. The most it can say is that the force which gives the reversal its charge is the same force that makes it unsafe, and that the film seems to know both.

The third is that the ending is a privilege story. A critic writing for Eye for Film observed that consequence seems to be a greater threat to the women involved, and the film bears that out. Samuel leaves for a job in Japan, Esmée goes on carrying what she knows, and Romy, as far as the film shows, keeps her company, her husband and her daughters. Telling a man with leverage that she is not afraid of him is something a chief executive whose husband has taken her back can afford to do. It is not a strategy for an intern, or for an assistant. This is conceded in full. The freest moment in the film belongs to the person with the most to fall back on.

The fourth runs the other way. By treating Samuel’s threats as pressure, this essay may be reviving an old and unlovely story, in which powerful women are secretly victims and young men are secretly predators, while the institutional power stays exactly where it always was, with her. The answer is that the essay has claimed stacking, not symmetry. The institution is hers from the first scene to the last, and the film’s own board-member scene shows what institutional leverage looks like when a man holds it. She holds the institution; he holds the story. Both are true, and the film is better for refusing to choose.

This Library belongs to a house in Japan that sells private companionship: evenings arranged in advance, paid for, with a stated beginning and a stated end, in which, at a woman’s request, someone else may hold the plan for a while. That is the position this essay was written from, and a reader should weigh everything above against it.

The interest runs in an obvious direction. An essay concluding that this want needs a room outside the office, and outside the secrecy of an affair, is convenient for a business that sells rooms. That is true, and saying so does not neutralise it.

There is a harder admission, and it is the reason this section exists. Money is a line of power too. In a paid evening she pays and the companion is paid, and if the role she asks for is one in which the companion leads, the evening crosses two lines exactly as the film’s office does: the person with the economic power is the person being led. Agreeing to that crossing in advance does not dissolve it. It only makes it visible.

So the standard this essay would hold any arrangement of that shape to, ours included, is the one the film shows being failed. Terms stated before anything begins. A fixed end. And a stop that is free on both sides of the money: hers, and the paid person’s, whose no is shadowed by money in the way an intern’s may be shadowed by a title. That is a standard, not a boast. Nobody can certify from the inside that they always meet it, and a house that sold its evenings as proof of their own safety would be playing Samuel’s trick with the phone call, answering a question about consent with a statement about itself.

And it should be said plainly that the film’s answer is not a service at all. Babygirl ends inside a marriage, with the want finally spoken to the person it had been hidden from. Nobody in that last room is paid.

It makes no legal judgement about any character. The Japanese guidance and criminal law are described because they show how power and consent are framed here, not to be applied to fictional people, and nothing in this essay is legal advice.

It is not a verdict on kink, or on the many people who practise negotiated power exchange with care. Its criticism is of one fictional arrangement and of the conditions the film places it in.

It diagnoses no one. Neurosis is a character’s word, and within the film it is rejected. This essay uses no clinical label for anyone, real or fictional, and nothing in it is a statement about any reader.

Reijn’s remarks are reported as hers, from her festival statement and published interviews, and are not treated as proof of any reading. The parallel between the board member and Ibsen’s Brack is this essay’s interpretation.

The film was not screened for this essay. What is described comes from its published record, from reviews and from interviews. Published accounts of the scene between Romy and Esmée differ about what else passes between them, and only what they agree on is reported here. Nothing is said about the private lives or experience of anyone who made or acted in the film, and nothing implies that anyone connected with it knows of this house or endorses it.

A few questions, for anyone who recognised something in that other room.

If you carry a want like Romy’s, where could it live so that stopping would cost nothing, for you and for the other person? In the arrangements you are already in, at work or at home, what would saying no cost you, and who set that price? Who else is standing in those rooms, unasked? Is there someone you could tell first, so that the want is known before anyone can hold it over you?

The film’s last scene is a woman saying, at last, what she wants to the person she had been performing for. It took a marriage, an affair, a fight between two men and a daughter’s push to get her there, and the film does not pretend the route was safe. But the place she arrives is the one worth noticing: a room where she can say stop and lose nothing but the moment.

Wanting to be held was never the dangerous part. The danger was always the price on the word stop, and that price is set by the room, not by the want. You deserve a room where it costs nothing.