Halina Reijn makes films about people who want something they are ashamed of, and then declines to punish them for it. The results so far are sharp, well acted and a little safer than they pretend to be. We rate her, with that caveat.
Fi1m perspective
Nicole Kidman gets down on a hotel room floor because an intern has told her to, and the camera does not cut. That is the moment in Babygirl (2024) that tells you what Halina Reijn is for. Most directors would have gone in close on the humiliation or away from it altogether. Reijn holds, and watches a woman stop performing. We were embarrassed for Romy, hands nearly over our eyes, and then we were not, and the switch happened in Kidman's face without any help from the edit.
Reijn spent more than twenty years in front of the camera and on stage before she went behind it. She was a stage actress in the Netherlands with Toneelgroep Amsterdam under Ivo van Hove, and she appeared in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006). Around 2019 she stopped acting and made Instinct, a Dutch-language drama about a prison therapist and a sex offender, which she wrote, directed and produced. Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) was her first film in English, a comedy hiding inside a slasher. Babygirl is her second, and the one we have reviewed, and it is the first to put her ideas about sex and power in front of a wide audience.
The ideas are consistent. Reijn is interested in the gap between how people behave at the dinner table and what they want when nobody is looking, and she keeps asking the question from the woman's side. She has said she grew up on the erotic thrillers of the 1990s and noticed that the woman usually got punished at the end. Of Babygirl she said: "This film is my answer, my female answer, to those films." In the film it shows. Romy is a chief executive who has never once said what she wants in bed. Reijn lets her say it, and nobody dies.
What works is the acting, which is where the theatre years earn their keep. She gets Kidman to do the least protected work she has done in a long time, and she shoots it without a flicker of judgement. Jasper Wolf has photographed all three of her features, and what he gives her is a camera that stays on a face long after a more nervous director would have moved on. What works less well is the softness. The genre Reijn is answering was cruel, and part of the point of answering it would be to keep some of the cruelty and aim it somewhere new. Babygirl is kinder to everyone in it than its models ever were, and we were not always sure the kindness was earned. It is a good film and a safe one.
Three features is early days, and the first of them is a film we have not reviewed and will not judge here. But the shape is clear: a director who can hold a camera on a shamed face until the shame turns into something else, and who has not yet let that face pay for it. The next one should be less careful. She has the actors for it.
Biography
Halina Reijn is a Dutch director, writer and former actress. Born in Amsterdam in 1975, she trained at the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts and began her career on stage in the 1990s before appearing in films such as Black Book (2006) and Valkyrie (2008).
She made her feature directorial debut with Instinct (2019), which she also wrote. Her subsequent films are the English-language features Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) and Babygirl (2024), the latter of which she wrote and produced.
