This film is about sex, specifically female sexuality, so if you have a problem with that, be forewarned. Arguably, the depiction of the sex here is rather tame. It's mostly just close-up shots of Nicole Kidman moaning and groaning. There is one scene where she strips nude, but it's still rather tasteful. The scene is rather reminiscent of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Director Halina Reijn is never exploitative or lewd. It's almost not as prurient as one might assume. It's about a woman discovering her sexuality late in life, a kind of sexuality that she's managed to repress her whole existence. In some ways, this film is a coming out story. It could almost be described as a queer film. Otherwise, it's just about a woman having an affair and realizing that her tryst is propagated via a kind of kink or fetish that arguably is not that far on the BDSM scale.
Kidman (The Hours and Moulin Rouge!) stars as Romy Mathis, the CEO of a tech company, based in New York City. She's very smart. She's a wiz at math, finance and business in general. She's often doing these videos or even live presentations that go to how she wants to present herself, not only as a CEO but also as a woman. Obviously, she's dealing with certain expectations, probably societal expectations of how a woman should be and how she should behave. She wants to project this image, that's clean-cut and wholesome or at least well put-together. Meanwhile, she has very naughty thoughts about what she wants sexually. She can have sex with her husband, but immediately after she has to satisfy herself in ways separate from him and in ways that he might not know. The irony is that her job requires a lot of communication and managing people, but she can't seem to manage her own sex life. She can't simply tell her husband what she wants that might be different from the norm.
Antonio Banderas (Pain and Glory and The Mask of Zorro) co-stars as Jacob Mathis, the husband to Romy. He's a theater director who is currently working on a new play that's about to premiere on Broadway. He's an older guy but he's still a sexy one. If his wife wanted to do some kinky or unusual stuff in the bedroom, he seems like he would be open to it. The reason is because he's Spanish and European men are in general more open sexually than the average American male. Secondly, he's played by Antonio Banderas, an actor who has been in numerous Pedro Almodóvar films. Being involved in strange or kinky sexual stuff has been a staple of Almodóvar films. Having Banderas in this role seems like miscasting on Reijn's part. Given that Romy's kink or fetish isn't so outlandish or crazy, it also makes her reticence to talk to her husband about it feel even more bizarre. I guess the argument is that she's so repressed that she can't speak or verbalize it, but it's not as if she wants to do stuff that's straight out of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) or even a John Waters flick.
Kidman may herself be miscast as well. Obviously, she's game for all of the provocative and lust-filled scenes, as sweaty or as awkward as they can get, such is the case when someone's discovering a kink for the first time. However, there's a moment that felt a little hard to believe, if not very much a stretch. Yes, as the recent Demi Moore film The Substance (2024), women and how they view themselves or their sense of self-beauty and self-worth can be warped due to how society treats them or sees them as they age. Yet, the scene where Romy has to say that she doesn't think she looks beautiful doesn't ring as true. Kidman is such a good actress that she can sell it, as best she can, but, as mentioned before, Kidman looks like Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, so saying she doesn't think she looks beautiful is such a disconnect.
Recently, Emma Thompson had a similar moment in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) where she had to strip nude and her reckoning with how she feels about her body was so much more powerful because she didn't already look as statuesque as Kidman. It's not to say that Thompson wasn't beauty, but I wonder how much more effective this film would've felt if it featured a more body diverse leading lady or even a more curvaceous or more plus-size woman of color. Over a decade or more ago, Eytan Fox directed Yossi (2013), which was about an overweight and not as attractive gay man who has to strip nude and also reckon with how he feels about his body, but in that film, he was overweight and not as attractive, certainly not as attractive as Kidman is here, so in that film, his anxiety and issues regarding his appearance ring truer.
Harris Dickinson (The Iron Claw and Triangle of Sadness) plays Samuel, an intern at the tech company where Romy is CEO. He basically begins an affair with her. He's not much more than a device to unlock her passions. He exists only in relation to her sexuality, which is probably appropriate for a film about female sexuality. We really don't care about him beyond that though.
Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity and language.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 54 mins.
In theaters.