BABYGIRL(2024)

Title: Babygirl

Written by: Halina Reijn

Draft date: 10/31/23 (White Production Draft)

LOGLINE

A powerful CEO of a tech automation company, outwardly in control of every aspect of her life, begins a dangerous affair with a bold young intern who intuits her deepest sexual desires — desires she has hidden from her husband, her colleagues, and herself for decades.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Sub-genre: Erotic Drama, Psychological Drama

Keywords: Female Protagonist, Power Dynamics, Forbidden Affair, Workplace, CEO, Age-Gap Relationship, Sexual Awakening, Dominance-Submission, Family, Infidelity, New York City, Corporate World, Mentor-Protégé, Identity, Shame, Christmas Setting

MPA Rating: R (sustained sexual content including BDSM dynamics, brief nudity, strong language throughout)

Budget Tier: Medium ($10M–$40M) — contemporary New York City locations, upstate house, office building, theater, hotel rooms, warehouse rave sequence requiring extras, no VFX

Pages: 90

Time Period: Present, over approximately 2-3 months (late autumn through early spring)

Locations: 70% interiors split between a modern corporate office building in midtown Manhattan (multiple floors, rooftop, basement, press room) and an upscale Manhattan apartment. 15% at an upstate family home with heated swimming pool. Remaining 15% across a cheap hotel room with red walls, a luxurious hotel presidential suite, a Broadway-style theater with backstage, a midtown bar, a warehouse rave venue outside the city, New York City streets, and various wellness/therapy clinics. All contemporary, no period requirements.

Lead: Female, 49, appears white/European, meticulously groomed corporate executive who projects total control while privately harboring submissive sexual desires rooted in a chaotic commune childhood.

Comparables: Secretary (2002) — workplace power-dynamic eroticism with a female protagonist exploring submission; In the Realm of the Senses (1976) — obsessive sexual relationship that threatens to consume all social structures; Unfaithful (2002) — married woman's affair and its domestic consequences; Fatal Attraction (1987) — workplace affair with escalating stakes, though the gender dynamics and sympathies are inverted here.

SYNOPSIS

ROMY (49), CEO of Tensile Automation, fakes an orgasm during sex with her husband JACOB (58), a warm, handsome theater director, then sneaks to her study to watch rough pornography and masturbate alone. The next morning, she prepares a flawless breakfast for her daughters ISABEL (15) and NORA (13), practices a product-launch speech, and heads to work. On the street, a stray dog charges at her. She falls, but a young man calms the dog with a cookie and a whistle. Later at the office, Romy delivers a polished livestream introducing a new warehouse robot. Her assistant ESME (25) brings in a group of new interns, and among them is SAMUEL (25), the young man from the street. He boldly questions Romy's sustainability claims. She is intrigued.

Samuel begins maneuvering closer. He selects Romy as his mentor through a company program she did not know she was part of. At a coffee machine, Romy asks how he calmed the dog. Their conversation crackles with tension. At home, Romy tentatively asks Jacob to watch porn during sex and to touch her more roughly — requests that make him uncomfortable. He calls the dynamic villainous. During the office Christmas party, Samuel tells Romy he has chosen her as his mentor. From the terrace, they share cigarettes and charged eye contact. Romy later picks up Samuel's discarded tie from the dance floor, takes it to her office, and uses it while masturbating.

After a first mentor meeting in a windowless basement room, Samuel provocatively tells Romy he thinks she likes to be told what to do. Stunned, Romy writes her phone number on his notepad. They nearly kiss. She pulls him in and kisses him, then immediately apologizes. Samuel begins texting and calling. He sends a glass of milk to her table at a bar. When she drinks it all while locking eyes with him, he whispers "Good girl" as he passes. Their encounters escalate. In a cheap hotel room, after a confrontational exchange, Samuel pushes her face into the carpet, and Romy experiences her first real orgasm with another person — an overwhelming, tearful release. Their affair deepens through a montage of secret meetings at the office and in alleyways, interwoven with scenes of Romy's domestic life.

Samuel arrives uninvited at Romy's upstate home, claiming Esme sent him to deliver a forgotten laptop. He charms Jacob and the girls. Furious afterward, Romy drives him to the train station and tells him their encounters outside work must stop. He is hurt and angry. Back at the office, Samuel threatens to request a department transfer, which Romy fears will trigger an investigation. In a second basement meeting, he coerces her into verbally consenting to their dynamic: she must say "I will do whatever you tell me to do." She does. In a luxurious hotel suite, they establish a safe word — "Jacob" — and engage in an extended session of domination, submission, and intimacy, culminating in sex and tender conversation.

Samuel also begins seeing Esme socially, which inflames Romy's jealousy. He appears at Isabel's sixteenth birthday party with Esme. In the kitchen, Romy confronts him. Esme nearly catches them. Later, Romy calls Esme into her office and, under the guise of concern, warns her that dating an intern is a power imbalance — a breathtaking act of hypocrisy. She then follows Samuel to a warehouse rave outside the city, where she is engulfed in a crowd of young ravers. She eventually finds him, and they retreat to a back room.

At home, Romy cruelly tells Jacob she has never had an orgasm with him, then walks out in the middle of the night to Samuel's bar, where he has her escorted out. The marriage fractures. In the kitchen the next morning, Romy tries to retract her confession, but the damage is done. Shortly after, Esme arrives at the apartment and reveals she knows about Samuel. She demands not a bribe but genuine leadership: Romy must end the affair, champion women in the company, and become someone Esme can respect. Romy, shaken, agrees.

Romy then confesses everything to Jacob — not just the affair, but the lifelong submissive fantasies she has been ashamed of since childhood, her commune upbringing, her feeling of being born defective. Jacob is devastated and furious. He orders her out. Romy retreats to the upstate house alone, where she spirals — smoking, not eating, sleeping in her clothes. Samuel appears at the pool one night. They share a final, bittersweet exchange in which Romy performs a mock EMDR session on him. Jacob arrives and discovers them. A violent fight erupts between the two men. Afterward, exhausted and icing their bruises, Jacob tells Samuel that Romy used him, that female masochism is a male construct. Samuel quietly disagrees, then apologizes and leaves.

Esme delivers a company-wide speech celebrating women's leadership while Romy isolates at the upstate house, dirty and broken. Isabel arrives and tells her mother that Jacob needs her and will forgive her. Romy goes to Jacob at the empty theater and apologizes for pretending to be someone else, then resenting him for not seeing her. MR. MISSEL (73), a board member, insinuates he knows about Samuel, now recruited away to Tokyo. Romy tells him to fuck off. In the final scene, months later, Jacob lovingly dominates Romy in their bedroom in his own authentic way, covering her eyes so she can surrender. Intercut, Samuel sits alone in the cheap hotel room, gently holding the stray dog. Romy orgasms for real with her husband. She looks into the camera, liberated.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The premise places a powerful woman's hidden sexuality at the center of a domestic and professional crisis, generating inherent tension from the collision between Romy's public authority and her private desire for submission. The concept pitches cleanly — a CEO risks everything for an intern who sees through her — and the power inversion provides a structural engine that keeps the relationship volatile. Romy's specific backstory (commune childhood, shame-driven overcompensation, decades of faking orgasms) gives the premise psychological depth that elevates it beyond a standard infidelity drama. The corporate automation setting works as thematic counterpoint: Romy builds machines that obey, while she craves to obey someone else. The premise shares territory with Secretary in its workplace BDSM dynamic and with Unfaithful in its married-woman-affair architecture, but distinguishes itself by centering the protagonist's interiority — the affair is less about passion than about Romy's fractured relationship with her own desires. The central dramatic question — whether Romy can integrate her hidden self into her real life — is compelling and carries genuine thematic stakes about female sexuality, shame, and self-knowledge.

STRUCTURE — Fair

The opening sequence efficiently establishes Romy's dual existence — faked orgasm with Jacob, real orgasm alone (2) — before the inciting incident arrives on schedule when Samuel calms the dog and then appears among the interns (6-8), roughly 7-8% in. The commitment to the central conflict lands when Romy writes her phone number on Samuel's pad and kisses him in the basement room (26-27), around 29%, slightly late but dramatically earned by the preceding tension. The midpoint functions effectively at the luxurious hotel suite sequence (60-64), approximately 67-71% through the page count, which is late for a traditional midpoint — this beat operates more as a deepening of the dynamic than a true reversal. The genuine reversal arrives when Esme confronts Romy (73-74), around 81%, and the confession to Jacob (75-80) serves as the crisis point. The climactic fight at the upstate house (82-84) lands at roughly 91%. This compression means the final act — reconciliation, Missel confrontation, resolution — occupies only about six pages (85-90), which handles the aftermath efficiently but somewhat hurriedly. The Esme speech montage intercut with Romy's isolation (85-87) is a structurally inventive bridge, though it slightly dissipates momentum before Isabel's arrival reignites forward motion (87).

CHARACTER — Good

Romy is a fully realized protagonist with all five arc beats accounted for: a clear backstory rooted in communes and shame, a conscious want (to maintain her perfect life), an unconscious need (to accept her authentic sexual self), active pursuit of both her desire and its concealment, and a completed arc when she integrates her hidden self in the final scene with Jacob (90). Her internal contradictions — control-obsessed CEO who craves submission, protective mother who endangers her family, feminist leader engaged in workplace abuse — are specific and consistently dramatized. Samuel is more schematic: his boldness, his intuitive reading of Romy, and his emotional volatility are established early (6, 26, 38-39), but his interiority remains elusive. His mention of a philosopher father (45) and his tearful EMDR moment (81) gesture toward depth without fully arriving there. Jacob earns genuine dimensionality in the confession scene (75-80) and the post-fight exchange (83-84), where his pain and intellectual framework ("Female masochism is a male fantasy") reveal a man grappling with limits of understanding, not just jealousy. Esme's evolution from eager assistant to moral authority (73-74) is the sharpest supporting arc, accomplished in remarkably few scenes.

CONFLICT — Good

The central conflict operates on three simultaneous levels: Romy versus Samuel (a power negotiation where dominance constantly shifts), Romy versus her marriage and professional reputation (external stakes that escalate with each encounter), and Romy versus her own shame (the deepest and most consequential layer). The external threat escalates convincingly — from stolen glances to secret meetings to Esme's confrontation to Jacob's discovery — with each stage raising specific, concrete stakes. The scene-level conflict is consistently strong: nearly every encounter between Romy and Samuel contains its own push-pull dynamic, as in the hotel room where she refuses to undress, then does (62), or the basement where he threatens to transfer departments unless she consents (57-58). The internal conflict is most powerfully articulated in the confession to Jacob (75-80), where Romy's struggle to name her desires aloud — "I want to be normal. I want to be what you like" (76) — crystallizes decades of repression into a single devastating moment. One limitation is that the professional consequences of exposure remain largely hypothetical. Romy fears being fired (51), but the board's actual power over her and the specific mechanisms of accountability are never tested, which slightly reduces the tension of the external stakes.

DIALOGUE — Good

The dialogue demonstrates strong differentiation across the principal cast. Jacob's voice is intellectual, teasing, and referential — discussing Hedda Gabler's suicide versus desire (16-17), calling Romy's speech "a seizure" (17) — while Samuel speaks in short, direct sentences that shift between fatherly warmth and predatory calm, as when he tells Romy "I think you like to be told what to do" (26). Romy's speech patterns convincingly bifurcate between her corporate register ("unmatched order, accuracy and efficiency") and her private vulnerability ("I want to be normal," 76). The subtext in the early encounters is particularly effective: the coffee machine exchange (10-11) operates entirely through double meanings, and the glass-of-milk sequence (33-34) communicates volumes without a word between the principals. The confession scene (75-80) achieves its power through Romy's halting, self-interrupting syntax — fragments, false starts, qualifications — which dramatizes the difficulty of articulating shame rather than simply stating it. Esme's confrontation speech (74) risks sounding overly composed for a 25-year-old, though her earlier scenes establish her as unusually articulate and ambitious, which partially earns it.

PACING — Fair

The first thirty pages move briskly, establishing Romy's world, introducing the threat of Samuel, and arriving at the first kiss with satisfying momentum. The middle section (30-65) is where pacing becomes uneven. The montage of escalating encounters (42-44) efficiently compresses time, but the luxury hotel suite sequence (60-64) extends across five pages of numbered beats that, while individually evocative, collectively slow the narrative at a point where external pressure should be mounting. The rave sequence (70-71) similarly prioritizes sensory immersion over plot advancement — it is effective as atmosphere but adds approximately two pages of runtime to a dynamic that is already established. Conversely, the final act is compressed: from Esme's confrontation (73) through Jacob's discovery and the fight (82-84), Romy's isolation, Isabel's rescue, and the reconciliation with Jacob, events accelerate to a degree that leaves the emotional aftermath underexplored. The final scene with Jacob (90) is only one page, and while its brevity arguably mirrors the simplicity of genuine intimacy, the resolution of a nineteen-year marriage crisis and a lifetime of sexual shame deserves slightly more space.

TONE — Good

The tonal register is consistently controlled, maintaining a precise balance between eroticism and psychological acuity throughout. The sex scenes avoid both clinical detachment and gratuitous titillation by grounding physical acts in emotional stakes — Romy's tears after her first real orgasm (41), the candy eaten from Samuel's hand (41), the milk saucer (64) — which keeps the tone serious without becoming grim. The domestic scenes with Jacob and the daughters provide necessary tonal relief and warmth, as in the overlapping breakfast dialogue (3-5) and the under-the-sheet conversation about Isabel's girlfriend (44). Two moments risk tonal disruption: the warehouse rave (70-71), which veers into sensory overwhelm that temporarily reads more like a music video than a character study, and Samuel's line "I could drown you right here" (80), which flirts with thriller-genre menace that the surrounding material does not fully support. The intercut Esme-speech-over-Romy's-deterioration sequence (85-87) achieves an effective ironic counterpoint, using corporate language about "radical self honesty" against images of Romy's genuine collapse.

ORIGINALITY — Good

While the erotic-affair-threatens-marriage framework is well-trodden — Unfaithful, Fatal Attraction, Eyes Wide Shut all explore marital transgression — the specific inversion here is distinctive: the woman holds institutional power, the man holds erotic power, and neither dynamic maps cleanly onto exploitation. Secretary is the closest predecessor in its workplace BDSM territory, but that film's protagonist discovers submission as liberation, whereas Romy has always known what she wants and is ashamed of knowing it — a meaningfully different psychological starting point. The integration of corporate feminism as both genuine aspiration and performative mask provides a layer of cultural specificity that grounds the material in a particular moment. The use of EMDR therapy as recurring motif and the commune-childhood backstory give Romy's desires a psychological architecture that resists simple explanation. What is most original is the refusal to resolve the central tension through either condemnation or celebration of Romy's desires — the ending presents integration rather than cure, which is a riskier and more intellectually honest conclusion than the genre typically provides.

LOGIC — Poor

The mentor program that places Romy — the CEO — on a list available to interns stretches plausibility, even with Hazel's explanation about the "talent war" (22). A CEO participating in a standard intern mentorship program is unusual enough that this mechanism deserves stronger justification. Samuel's ability to locate and arrive at the upstate family home (44-45) is attributed to Esme, which works logistically but strains credibility given that Esme would have no obvious reason to send an intern on such an errand. Romy's claim to Jacob that the affair happened "once" with "a stranger" whose name she doesn't know (79) is a lie, but the text does not fully register that Jacob later discovers the full truth — the fight scene (82) implies he sees Samuel at the house, but his line "How long? How fucking long?" (83) suggests he has now deduced the scope, which could be clearer. The ending's suggestion that Jacob has learned to "dominate" Romy in his own way (90) represents significant character development that occurs entirely offscreen between the theater reconciliation and the final scene, raising the question of how this transformation occurred.

CRAFT — Good

The writing operates in a lean, directive style that reads as a blueprint for performance rather than literary prose, which is appropriate for material this dependent on actors' bodies and faces. Character introductions are efficient — Romy's morning routine (3) communicates control, perfectionism, and masking in a single sequence without exposition. The recurring visual motifs (the automated warehouse as metaphor for Romy's mind, the dog as emblem of domesticated wildness, the dirty carpet versus the pristine home) demonstrate a visual imagination working through images rather than dialogue. Action description is generally precise: "He holds her down like a kitten" (38) and "She squirms like a snake shedding its skin" (33) convey physical dynamics in a few words. There are minor errors: "hid hand" for "his hand" (26), "video's" for "videos" (2), "PRE-LAB" for "PRE-LAP" (80, 85), "area's" for "areas" (8), "others eyes" for "other's eyes" (64). The numbered hotel-suite beats (60-64) represent an unconventional formatting choice that works as a shot list but reads slightly mechanically on the page. The integration of INXS and George Michael tracks into the action description presumes specific licensing, which is a production consideration worth noting.

OVERALL — Recommend

Babygirl is a psychosexual drama about a tech CEO who risks her marriage, career, and public identity when a young intern unlocks the submissive desires she has spent a lifetime concealing. The strongest elements are the premise's inherent tension, the fully realized arc of Romy's character from concealment to confession to integration, and the dialogue's capacity to operate through subtext — the early encounters between Romy and Samuel, and particularly the confession scene with Jacob, represent the material at its most accomplished. The weakest areas are structural: the middle section's extended erotic sequences slightly delay the escalation of external stakes, while the final reconciliation is compressed in a way that asks the ending to do work the preceding pages have not fully prepared. Samuel remains more catalyst than character — effective in function but elusive in interiority. The craft is confident and visually literate throughout, with recurring motifs that deepen the thematic architecture. The material takes genuine risks in its refusal to moralize about Romy's desires while honestly depicting their cost, arriving at an ending that is neither punitive nor permissive but something rarer: integrated.