One is tempted to describe the latest film by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) as a simple antifeminist parable. Called Babygirl, the new movie stars Nicole Kidman as a tech CEO married to a successful stage director in Manhattan. Unhappy in love, Kidman’s Romy Mathis begins an affair with an intern named Samuel (Harris Dickinson) and proceeds to blow up her entire life. Viewers of a certain age and bent, having shared the last half-century with Phyllis Schlafly, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and “tradwives,” will grasp the score at once: A woman has it all, hates it, and tears it apart. “Do you want to lose everything?” Samuel asks Romy during a revealing exchange. “You give that impression.” 

Of course, more is going on in Reijn’s slippery production than mere ideology-pushing. Yet what ideologies are here ought not to be elided too quickly. From its first panting moments, Babygirl is a film about sex: who has it, in what form, and, crucially, with what shifting power dynamics. What Romy wants is a man who will dominate her, not quite in the style of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) but to a greater extent than her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), is willing. What she gets instead is a lesson in making the best of what one has. Even a bazillionaire, the picture clearly implies, must sacrifice something to make it all work. If Reijn’s goal was to bring female sexual desire under political discipline, she could hardly have made a more instructive movie.