Romy is a very successful woman, head of an important company in New York and at the same time a wife and mother. Her relationship with her husband Jacob, very different from her and with a more artistic nature working as a theater director, is solid but from a sexual point of view Romy remains unsatisfied. In the office she meets Samuel, a young intern who seems to sense something about the woman’s desire and is happy to take control. An exciting but risky relationship is born, in which the two play on the razor’s edge of an ambiguous power dynamic.

In the meantime Reijn approached the American world with the comedy Bodies bodies bodies, before cashing in on the interest of a name like Nicole Kidman to work together. This led to the writing of the character of Romy, which Kidman brings to life with enthusiasm and passion, and which confirms the diva’s non-trivial acting research, always open to risky challenges.

Her character is also open to risk, knowing that she is putting both her career and her family at risk (not immune to the subtle satirical charge of the film, and well colored by her husband Antonio Banderas and the couple’s two daughters), and who launches into a torrid affair with the young Samuel in search of a different sexual dynamic, exploratory of the kink world and marked by submission; a marked contrast (but actually very common) with every other aspect of her daily life that sees her in control and in command.

From this point of view, the attempt to root Romy’s path with small references to childhood is almost superfluous, as if having to find an overabundant explanation in a world in which kink itself is now widely accepted.

Nevertheless, the writing offers the most interesting nuances of the work, dealing with the boundaries and the development of the relationship between the two in a much more authentic way than we are used to seeing in similar products. Frank and fresh, the script shows us all the uncertainties and the level of negotiation required by such an experiment, which does not arrive on the screen already unrealistically formed but must pass through the embarrassment, the ridiculous and the many variables of the situation, thus honoring the desire itself in its persistence.

Reijn also sketches an intriguing profile for Harris Dickinson (who in his still young career has already left his mark for directors such as Eliza Hittman, Joanna Hogg, Ruben Östlund and Xavier Dolan), emblem of a multifaceted masculinity as required by our times, attentive to consent and yet eager to play with gender roles and expectations – and above all not defeatist in the face of the inevitable confusion that such contrasts sometimes entail.

In short, the erotic thriller that wakes up in the twenties (through the outsider perspective of a Dutch woman in the rigid American logic, as well as under the trendy aegis of A24) is a little less of a thriller than we remember, and funnier and more self-deprecating.

Without ever slipping into kitsch or camp, it injects just enough self-awareness into the genre, with some meta streaks in accompanying the very real self-fiction that chase each other on the scene.