The New Yorker:

The relationship at the heart of a new erotic thriller, starring Nicole Kidman, doesn't explode power struggles; it exists within them.

By Naomi Fry

In November, the reality star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian posted a series of images and videos to her social-media accounts, in which she appeared to promote Tesla’s new A.I. robot, Optimus. In a video on X, captioned “Meet my new friend,” Kardashian is seen engaging with Elon Musk’s humanoid golem, which reportedly retails for around thirty thousand dollars, and whose metal torso is inscribed with the Tesla logo. “O.K., hi!” she says perkily, off camera, as she waves her manicured fingers just within frame—a motion that is immediately echoed by the robot. “Can you do this: ‘I love you’?” she asks next, forming a half heart with her hand, proffering it to the robot to urge him to complete the shape, and gasping in awe as he eagerly complies. But Optimus, who in the video seems more than happy to be at his mistress’s beck and call, appears less subservient in a series of pictures in which Kardashian, wearing spike heels and lingerie, poses beside him and a gold Tesla Cybercab. Seated in the vehicle with one silvered leg slung louchely out the open car door, the robot’s presence is now more menacing and eroticized, and his RoboCop-like facelessness throws Kardashian’s exposed flesh, in its own cyborgian, airbrushed perfection, into higher relief. Who’s the boss in this Cronenberg-in-Calabasas-style fantasy? Is it the woman, or is it the robot? And is there much of a difference between the two anymore?

My mind kept returning to Optimus as I watched “Babygirl,” the Dutch director Halina Reijn’s new film, which stars Nicole Kidman as Romy Mathis, the C.E.O. of a robotics company. In the movie, Romy is a middle-aged post-“Lean In” girlboss who seems, to almost everyone around her, to have it all. She is an esteemed leader in her field, a mentor to young women, a wearer of many delicious cream- and taupe-hued cashmere ensembles, and a resident of a gorgeous New York floor-through apartment and a stately country house. At home, she’s an attentive mother of two teen daughters and a longtime wife to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), an affectionate and hunky theatre director who is seemingly able to bring her to still-robust orgasm. Her frame is waspishly slim, and she has taut, nearly wrinkle-free skin, which she upkeeps with Botox and cold plunges.

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