Babygirl Review: Nicole Kidman Takes Control

“Babygirl” isn’t a romantic comedy or a romance or even a comedy, though it concerns matters of the heart, and has a friskily impolite sense of humor.Set over what seems like a very long Christmas season, it centers on Romy — a transfixing Nicole Kidman — a married woman who enters a dominant-submissive affair that almost consumes her.

It’s a story about women, bodies and the regulation of both, and what it means when a woman surrenders her most secret self.All of which is to say, it’s also about power, but with kinks.Romy is the chief executive of a slick, growing robotics company that, from its videos, seems to provide warehouse automation.

Presumably, the robots moving goods around will eventually make human labor redundant; in the meantime, they serve as a hard-working metaphor for a woman who’s rationalized every aspect of her existence.At her New York apartment, she dresses for another high-flying workday but then slips on a frowzy apron as she packs her children’s lunches with handwritten notes.

(The lack of hired help is an off detail.) The apron seems incongruent with her job and the frictionless perfection of her domestic realm that her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), puzzlingly ask about it.The writer-director Halina Reijn (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) is just as scrupulously attentive to detail as Romy.With sensitivity to the gilded surfaces of Romy’s life, and with a series of brisk, narratively condensed scenes, the filmmaker sketches in a woman who presents an aspirational ideal, from her glossy lipstick to her teetering heels.

Yet while the ceiling-to-floor windows of Romy’s importantly situated office announce that she’s a contemporary woman with nothing to hide, you know better: By the time Romy first breezes into work, you have already watched her sprint naked from her postcoital bed — where Jacob is sleeping the deep, contented sleep of the satiated — so she can secretly masturbate to online pornography.The movie...