Babygirl review: ‘follow your heart’s desire’

This absence of satisfaction becomes impossible to ignore when new intern Samuel (an excellent Harris Dickinson) shows none of the deference that people at the bottom of the ladder are expected to show to those at the top. It is as if he detects that Romy craves a transference of power. Workplace etiquette and the executive’s authority crumble when they are in each other’s company. The scene in a cheap hotel where the affair begins is superbly observed and charged with the risk and hesitancy that goes with fulfilling long-suppressed desire.

When Samuel turns up at Romy’s home and meets her family Reijn’s script appears to be barrelling towards Basic Instinct territory. Yet whereas that film was a moral cautionary tale about the price of following your desires, this one plies the much more interesting lesson that we suppress them at our peril.

Reijn also shows a generation gap. Romy and her peers may be running the corporations but they are powerless in the face of the Generation Zeds who are writing the rules of 21st- century life. When Banderas’s Jacob dismisses Romy’s sexual needs as trivial self-indulgence the response that he is dated is both brutal and final.