Elizabeth Brady ’25 is a public policy major and an English minor, and she is a member of Alpha Chi Omega. She loves art, music and movies. Email her at eabrady@wm.edu.
December 25th is usually a pretty big deal to people. It’s the birthday of both Jesus of Nazareth and Jimmy Buffet (two of my favorite Capricorns)! This year, it was also the day of the double-release of Robert Eger’s “Nosferatu” and Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl.” A sort of Barbenhiemer for freaks, if you will.
I committed fully to the double feature. “Nosferatu” knocked my socks off and freaked me out so bad. It was well-paced, well-acted and great to look at. I can’t imagine anyone but Lily Rose-Depp playing Ellen, and I always love to watch Willam Dafoe be a strange, strange old man. “Babygirl,” on the other hand, is more of a mixed bag. Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson are both convincingly awkward and engaging enough to keep you locked in, but not so much so as to put you at ease. It’s certainly script-heavy, visuals are deliberate and artful but nothing crazy and the pacing lags a bit in the second half.
Both “Babygirl” and “Nosferatu” are certainly movies for freaks; they’re movies about sex, but more importantly, they’re movies about shame. There’s the old film-analysis adage that the horror in a horror movie reflects the collective fears of the society that produced it. In “Nosferatu” the horror, the creature, the evil, is a manifestation of Ellen’s shame; shame for being strange, shame for her desire, shame for the parts of herself that can’t be corseted into comprehensibility. When she is overcome with attacks of paralysis and epilepsy, the people around her try and fail to understand them within the limits of what they already know. Only in Professor Franz (Dafoe), is she able to find someone who takes her seriously, and he allows her the agency to fully defeat what plagues her.
Although it doesn’t have Bill Skarsgard in a big weird bald cap and a mustache, “Babygirl” contends with similar themes. Romy (Kidman) is unsatisfied in her marriage and unable or unwilling to communicate with her husband (Antonio Banderas (!!!!!!!!)) about it. The first scenes of her affair with Samuel (Dickinson) are stilted, awkward and hesitant. Their dynamic is tenuous and mercurial. Power games are played, blackmail is mailed, careers are threatened, cigarettes are smoked and at one point Kidman drinks milk out of a bowl on the ground. “Babygirl” makes you very aware of how awkward sex (especially kinky sex) can be, and it doesn’t pull any punches about how painfully debasing asking for what you really want can be.
The Babygirl/Nosferatu combo is an interesting development, especially after the popular anti-sex-scene discourse of late. The idea that Gen-Z is more prudish than past generations is almost entirely at odds with the accessibility and ubiquity of graphic sexual content on the internet and with hookup culture as a whole. Movies about sex, shame, repression, power dynamics and vulnerability couldn’t be more timely as we try to navigate a world where communication and connection have been fundamentally changed by technology.
Neither “Babygirl” nor “Nosferatu” are sober treatises on the importance of sexual health, they’re movies! They’re a little sexy sometimes! They’re interesting to watch! They’re funny to read and write tweets about! They are films that can and will elicit different reactions from different audiences. So I encourage you to go in with an open mind and to think deeply about what makes you lean in and what makes you shrivel into your seat.
If you choose to engage in the Nosferatu/Babygirl double feature, make sure it’s in a setting you’re comfortable with, with someone you trust, and if you’re streaming it illegally, make sure to use protection.