DRAMA; 1hr 54 min
STARRING: Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas
Water Baby: Kidman and Dickinson
Nicole Kidman has never shied away from putting herself out there as an actress: Birth, Rabbit Hole, The Paperboy... She’s at it again in the role of corporate kahuna Romy Mathis, New York City robotics company CEO, wife (of Banderas’s unsuspecting theatre director, Jacob), mother of two girls (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly) and, most tellingly and paradoxically, a sexually submissive adulterer.
Romy has a restless mind and a ravenous heart that threatens to wreak havoc on her sleek existence, as ravenous hearts will, when writer-director Halina Reijn’s descent into carnality hits its ominous stride. For starters, Romy’s nascent affair with her 25-year-old intern, Samuel (Dickinson, who in reality is 28 to Kidman’s 57), is lunacy writ large. He may well be risking his job but she has a hard-earned life to lose — including, most seductively, as it happens, the control over it she so ably calibrates each day.
Those checks and balances fail her, however, when in a classic instance of like attracting like, Samuel’s own dominating nature speaks to Romy’s most private, sexually dissatisfied self. She may not consciously realise it, yet as she witnesses him subduing a savage dog in the street outside her office, Romy is a goner before she and Samuel have spoken a word. She can no more resist this coolly assured young enabler than deprive herself any longer of the primal oxygen her marriage lacks. Cool assurance is never to be trifled with, however, especially when turbocharged with the arrogance of youth.
If animalistic impulse is the enemy of established order, Harrison and Romy are a cat–mouse catastrophe waiting to crash and burn. As the dictator of intimate terms, he is necessarily the more remote, but Kidman’s Romy throws her whole, hungry self into a spin-out of physical and psychological nakedness. The May-December power plays feel more desperate than erotic, and secretive, self-serving Romy isn’t necessarily a woman to warm to. But she is one you feel compelled to keep an eye on.
