Halina Reijn’s office affair is sharper, funnier and better acted than its genre usually manages, and Nicole Kidman has not been this exposed in years. It is also more careful than it wants you to think, and kinder than the genre has any habit of being.
Halina Reijn has made an erotic thriller in which nobody gets punished, and that is the whole idea. Romy (Nicole Kidman) is a chief executive, is married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), has two daughters and has never got what she wants in bed, or said so. Samuel (Harris Dickinson) is an intern who soon tells her he thinks she likes being told what to do. The set-up belongs to Fatal Attraction. What Reijn does with it is funnier, kinder and better acted than that film’s descendants usually manage, and more careful than the trailer promises. It is a good film and a safe one.
Kidman is the reason to see it. Romy chairs meetings, performs confidence for a living and cannot say a true sentence about what she wants in her own bedroom. The scene that got at us is the first hotel room. Samuel tells her to get on the floor, and she does, and Kidman’s face goes from a woman performing embarrassment to a woman who has stopped performing anything. We were embarrassed for her, hands nearly over our eyes, and then we were not, and the switch happened without a cut. It is the least protected work she has done in a long time, and Reijn shoots it without a flicker of judgement.
Dickinson is just as good, in a part that is harder to see. Samuel is not a seducer with a plan; he is a young man testing whether the thing he has guessed about his boss is true, and Dickinson gives him a hesitation before each order, as if checking his own nerve. When he tests it in front of other people, we laughed, and then felt something we were less sure of, which is the effect the film is after. Banderas, as a husband quietly certain he is a good lover, plays a man who is wrong about himself without ever making him a fool.
Jasper Wolf shoots the offices in glass and grey, all reflections and nobody’s face quite in focus, and the hotel in a low amber that makes it look smaller than it is. Matthew Hannam cuts the sex short; it is talked about at length and shown briefly, and several scenes are over almost as they begin. Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s score is the sound of a choir hyperventilating, breaths and gasps arranged into something like music, and it does more than anything else to tell us the film knows how absurd its people are being. Bart Mueller and Kurt Swanson dress Romy in cream and black tailoring that sits on her like armour and Samuel in a suit that looks borrowed.
The trouble is around the edges. The film has ideas about the workplace, about who is allowed to want what at work and who pays for it, and it points at them without saying much. Sophie Wilde’s Esme, Romy’s assistant, has a thread about ambition that arrives as a speech when it needed a scene. The middle hour repeats its route, office to hotel to kitchen to hotel, and we started counting the loops. Most of all, for a film about shame, every encounter arrives with its consent worked out in advance and its exits marked. A few critics have called it safe. We would say it is kind, and kindness costs a thriller something.
Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies was a comedy hiding inside a slasher. This is a comedy hiding inside an erotic thriller, and it is smarter than the films it borrows from about who actually wants what. It is also gentler with everyone in it than those films ever were, and we were not always sure the gentleness was earned.
See it with someone you are prepared to argue with afterwards. The 18 certificate is earned by the talk rather than the flesh, and at 115 minutes it is over before the arguments are.
