The Venice Film Festival reviews have been arriving like flying grenades…fast and furious and going boom-boom-boom. I’m already feeling like I can’t breathe. But for some reason I’ve found myself settling into reactions to Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl, which feels…I don’t know what it is, but it feels odd.

The only thing that scares me about Babygirl (A24, 12.25…a Christmas movie?) is that it’s been described as “sex positive.” Whenever I hear that term something inside me goes thud. Or do I mean plop?

I explained last May that “sex positive” gives me the creeps because “the best heteronormative sex is usually untidy and objectionable in some way — rude, hungry, raw, animalistic, runting, howling, pervy.”

From a Babygirl review by Flick Feast‘s Dallas King: “Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson have an undeniable, smouldering, palpable chemistry…but while always pushing boundaries, Babygirl never feels like it truly breaks them. Someone shouted the safe word too early!”

From Owen Gleiberman’s Venice Film Festival review:

“Babygirl is a shrewdly honest and entertaining movie about a flagrantly ‘wrong’ sadomasochistic affair. In Bodies Bodies Bodies, director Halina Reijn created a tone of overwrought satirical slasher pulp, but here she settles into a far more realistic mode, and brings it off with flair.

“Babygirl is reminiscent, at times, of Fair Play” — WHAT? — “but it’s also a tale of adultery that pushes genuine emotional buttons, the way Unfaithful did 20 years ago. And that’s rooted in the fearless performance of Kidman.

“Straddling the identities of mother, boss, defiant adulterer and trembling sexual supplicant, Nicole Kidman’s Romy, a rich CEO, is like a walking mood ring. Her performance takes off from a long-standing (hidden) reality: that people who are hooked on wielding power can have primal fantasies of being sexually submissive.

“For decades, prominent male executives have been keeping B&D sex workers in business, but in movies we haven’t seen the corporate gender tables turned in quite this way. For a while, Babygirl comes on like a less glossy 9 1/2 Weeks, as Harris Dickinson’s Samuel breaks down Romy’s defenses, notably in a scene where people from the office are having cocktails after work and he sends her over a drink…of milk. He’s saying, ‘You’re my baby girl.’ And when she drinks it down, she’s saying, ‘Yes I am.'”