“Get on your knees” Harris Dickinson orders Nicole Kidman, as their characters tentatively crawl into a sub-dom affair in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. His character means it, but in the moment he does something disarming; he laughs, his cocky intern Samuel struck by the absurdity of ordering the older, steely CEO Romy Mathis around sexually, when he’s not sure what she wants, when he is sure that she also doesn’t know what she wants.
It’s a nicely human moment in a film that can be otherwise cold, and it should stand out. Seeing it in a packed weekend screening in an Omniplex, the audience were engaged by the awkward introduction to Romy exploring her desire to be dominated, they laughed. It’s just that they also laughed when Samuel called Romy a “good girl”. And when he wrestled her to the ground. And essentially whenever, in this film billed with the tagline “get exactly what you want”, Romy got anything that she wanted.
Nervous, embarrassed, self-conscious, throughout the film the audience giggled and whispered their way through the story of a woman’s sexual self-actualising through submission, a confident businesswoman and assured mother exploring herself – and searching for the orgasm her husband Antonio Banderas hasn’t given her in 19 years of marriage – by following the orders of her intern.
It’s not that there is nothing to laugh at in Babygirl. Like Reij’s satirical Gen Z slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, this film similarly is at its best when it’s light on its feet; when it drops George Michael hits on the soundtrack, when Dickinson is disarmingly direct. It’s billed as a thriller, but ironically it is much too lacking in danger to function as one. It might be a more vanilla version of Secretary, a sweeter, smarter, sexier story of a woman finding her confidence through BDSM. Babygirl to be clear is fun and charming, particularly thanks to strong performances by its leading lad and lady, but a thriller it ain’t, Romy’s journey ultimately helping her to become a more understanding mother, a more emotionally open wife. We learn little of Samuel’s life outside of Romy’s eyes, there is no menacing mystery to his desires; he’s up front and committed to consent, he spruces up his boss’s sex life and more or less walks off into the night.
Samuel is not a threat, he’s a fantasy, tightly wrapped and tatted into the beautiful swimmer’s build body of rising star Dickinson. His deep dom voice calling Kidman a good girl is the prime part of the package, it’s what the tickets have been sold for, it is ostensibly the thrill that the audience are here to hear. Giggling like a secondary school Biology class then, is an interesting reaction.
A study last year found that the Hollywood sex scene is declining fast, with almost 40% less sexual content in major films than there was at the start of the millennium. Social media cycles constantly through conversation about how sex scenes “add nothing to the plot” of films, how they’re a waste of time, how they’re only there to provide titillation, and that titillation is inherently and utterly bad. Whether it’s because of our modern capitalist nightmare trapping cringing viewers onto the same movie-watching couch as their parents for way too long, or the overwhelming dominance of four-quadrant films that want to appeal to all-ages and all-demographics so desperately there’s no room for something so scandalously human as sex, it’s something film fans have talked themselves out of seeing.
Those awkward laughs and seat shuffles may actually come from the same feeling that brought those audience members to buy tickets to Babygirl in the first place. Like Nicole Kidman’s character, they might be struggling to admit their own desires to themselves. They have been placed into an unseeing corner on command, but they long to turn around, to give in, to desire and be desired. They just need a little guidance, then maybe they can experience the thrill of living vicariously through a character given “exactly what she wants” with that thing not being a glowing rock or psychic powers or a laser sword.

A generation of cinemagoers have mostly been seeing stories of the smooth, super and sexless, a (hairless) landscape where, as described seminally by RS Benedict, Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny. As part of that essay, Benedict also connected the homes we see on screen too, massive, minimalist, messless, with a modern sterility of self; treating the body as an investment, optimising always, perfectly crafting an exterior image, denying what’s on the inside.
A body is no longer a holistic system. It is not the vehicle through which we experience joy and pleasure. It is not a home to live in and be happy.
Romy’s home in Babygirl is, inevitably, a sterile environment of whites and greys, hard angles and tackily impeccable taste, a million miles away from the dingy motel room in her mind where Samuel masters an obedient dog. Though there is playfulness in the film’s presentation, a little too often it is aiming to externalise Romy’s emotions with a Kubrickian coldness, to mixed results. Slow zooms in on her standing by the window, contemplating her shame, are oddly reminiscent of the pining window pains of another unusual pair of lovers currently dominating cinema screens.

The Robert Eggers’ adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s classic not-Dracula story Nosferatu has risen and risen over the last month, becoming one of the biggest non-Twilight vampire movies ever at the box office. The vampire has served as a stand-in for many different anxieties across generations, often sexual ones, a threat from beyond coming to steal innocence away. But while ol’ Nasty Noz in the 2025 version embodies some of the usual psychosexual hang-ups associated with vampires – of women like Lily Rose-Depp’s Ellen Hutter giving into sin, of men like Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter being cucked, sidelined and discarded – the hulking Bill Skarsgaard version of der vampyr, hanging dong and sporting a tache last seen in 70s pornography, mostly represents a scary manifestation of sex itself.
From her youth, an isolated and alone Ellen prayed for an angel to rid her of her loneliness, and in the process became bound to the cursed creature Nosferatu, a violent abomination who sullies her, and dooms her, by mere association. The desires that she has as a result of this bond make her depressed and hysterical, and their re-emergence shock and dismay her prudish and pious friends and husband who watch her writhe and moan, and lust, and bleed. Appearing to Ellen in the night, Nosferatu tells her that he is “appetite and nothing more”. Men are monsters who crave young flesh. This isn’t a matter of romance. Right?
If you’re a monster-fucker or a moustache fan (no kink shaming on Film In Dublin), then Nosferatu’s frightening appearance might do it for you, we’ll hear you out, but Eggers is on record as wanting his take on the character most of all to bring the scary back to the vampire, designing a “putrid, walking undead corpse”. Nosferatu brings death and disease from his isolated Carpathian mountains to the metropolitan streets of Germany, a campaign that he says will not stop unless Ellen fulfils her oath to give herself to him. Selling movie tickets by the bucketful and kicking off an inevitable round of interminable discourse, Eggers’ film is fussy and overlong, but in some ways it is the perfect horror for this era of sex-shy audiences, a film that literally turns “I hate sex scenes they’re irrelevant to the plot” into a Faustian bargain. If the masses want Willem Dafoe hamming it up, and jump scares, and gothic gross outs, then they’re going to have to swallow their medicine and watch a little bit of vampire fucking. That’s Nosferatu‘s bargain, and he is coming.
Maybe the movie audience has always yearned to be scandalised. For an industry that has embraced the philosophy that sex sells like no other, Hollywood has always had a relatively puritan view on the subject. The big hitting erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s – Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Cruel Intentions – became word-of-mouth hits because of a viewing public talking in hushed tones about that scene that you weren’t meant to see – stoking the o.g. ‘down with this sort of thing’ curiosity.
Even or perhaps especially in the online age, that kind of protest-too-much pearl clutching is making a comeback. Viewers might tell an anonymous survey that they don’t want sex in movies, and they might chase likes on social media by calling it pointless, but when they’re talking to each other they’re still asking, did you hear about that scene in Saltburn? Eh? With the…bath water? Mad. Weird. Not my cup of tea now.
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An audience able to be honest about their desires is one better able to ask for exactly what they want from film studios, for mature, diverse, engaging stories that explore human connection with a firmer thrust, Maybe awkward laughing, distracting and feigned disinterest are part of the growing pains of audiences refamiliarising themselves with sex on screen. You can all talk at the watercooler about how ‘strange’ the film you saw was, or allude to being embarrassed online, but you still bought the ticket lads. When you’re in a glass house, we can see you standing in that corner.