LOS ANGELES — A woman moans. Alone in her living room, lying on her stomach, hand on her crotch, she stares fascinated at a pornographic video clip, just moments after simulating an orgasm with her husband. This is not a scene from adult entertainment, but the opening of Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s new feature film.
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In this daring role, Nicole Kidman plays an accomplished, respected CEO and mother in search of the thrills she’ll find in a transgressive relationship with a seductive intern. The first minutes already set the tone: Babygirl is not just an exploration of desire, but a reflection on our relationships to power, vulnerability and intimate dynamics.
Today, this kind of film no longer an anomaly in a Hollywood, where the industry has seemed increasingly chaste in recent years. Rather, it is an example of a cultural evolution: The return of sexual issues to the silver screen.
In 2024, a number of outstanding American films confirmed the revival of eroticism. Sean Baker’s Palmer d’Or winner Anora explores the throes of sex work through the intimate, nuanced portrait of a its protagonist juggling economic constraint and personal desire.
French director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a Hollywood erotic thriller about the fear of aging and the violence of the male gaze on women. In Queer, Luca Guadagnino observes an intense homosexual relationship, where — far from seeking shock effect — the sex scenes reveal the vulnerability of the characters. In Challengers, Guadagnino unveils a tennis love triangle led by Zendaya, where every rally on the court becomes a metaphor for the intensity of repressed desire and implicit power plays.
We could also mention films from 2023: Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, a sharp critique of the bourgeoisie exploring provocative eroticism; or Poor Things, by Yorgos Lanthimos, which proposes a radical exploration of sexual freedom and the reappropriation of the female body through an absurdist gothic tale. Finally, let’s not forget the comedy No Hard Feelings, which dared in a burlesque scene to completely undress its actress Jennifer Lawrence — something that hadn’t been seen for a star of this caliber for a long time.
All these movies share a common desire: to put sex and eroticism back at the heart of the cinematic narrative, less to shock than to question. After years of relative chastity, marked by the rise of teenage superhero franchises and increased control of international markets sometimes resistant to sexual expression, Hollywood is rediscovering the narrative power of intimacy.
The rise and fall of erotic thrillers
Since the beginning of the 2000s, a wave of puritanism seems to have swept through Hollywood, relegating the erotism that marked previous decades to the status of a relic of bygone cinema. Yet in the 1980s and 1990s, the erotic thriller reigned supreme, exploring the blurred boundary between desire and danger.
Works such as American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, Brian de Palma’s Pulsions and Body Double, and the canonical Fatal Attraction, with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, anchored sex as the central narrative driving force, playing abundantly with the femme fatale motif. In 1992, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct marked the peak of the genre: Sharon Stone crossed and uncrossed her legs, and global cinema held its breath.
‘Showgirls’ (1995) became the symbol of this decline.
Other successes followed, including Sliver, Disclosure and Wild Things, exploring the subtleties of power, manipulation and blurred seduction. But these uneven tales sometimes fail to go beyond the simple fascination with voyeurism, turning eroticism into a mirror for the darkest desires, or a pretext for superficial moral dilemmas.
As flourishing as the genre was, it wasn’t long before it fell into sharp decline. Showgirls (1995), a bold new attempt by Paul Verhoeven and star screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, became the symbol of this decline. What was intended as an unfiltered dive into the world of Las Vegas strippers was greeted by an avalanche of mocking — and frankly unfair, if you watch the film again today — critiques. Although the feature acquired cult status years later, its commercial failure put an end to the era of large-scale erotic thrillers.
Superheros and TV series
Other ill-fated attempts, such as Body of Evidence, starring Madonna, and William Friedkin’s Jade, further discredited the genre, now associated with poorly crafted stories overloaded with clichés. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, released at the end of 1999, appears to be the genre’s swansong.
For Karina Longworth, film historian and author of a podcast series on the erotic thriller, this hypnotic tale of the twists and turns of desire and jealous in a New York couple (played by Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise) is both “the culmination and deconstruction of the genre, questioning the moral decay of the rich and powerful while revealing the underlying anxieties of contemporary sexuality.”
Erotic thrillers gradually disappeared from the Hollywood radar, perceived as out of sync with public expectations. At the end of the 1990s, a combination of factors sealed their fate: market saturation, creative exhaustion, the emergence of the Internet and its promise of sexuality accessible at the click of a button.
At the same time, studios turned to lucrative franchises, capable of flooding the sometimes conservative international markets — notably China and the Muslim world. And as journalist Alexandra Schwartz, who co-hosts “Critics at Large,” The New Yorker’s cultural podcast, points out, “the superhero films that have dominated the box office over the past 20 years are not primarily made for adults, and don’t combine well with the representation of sexuality.”
A study conducted by The Economist looking at sexual content (excluding assault) in the 250 best-selling films each year, revealed a 40% decline since 2000. At the same time, representations of sexuality are migrating toward independent productions and HBK (the pioneering cable channel), with series such as Sex and the City, Oz, The Deuce, or more recently Euphoria, where intimacy can be explored with greater freedom, for a discerning audience comfortably seated on the couch.
#MeToo and realistic representations
In 2024, a wind of change seems to be blowing again. Why is eroticism making a comeback today? The aftermath of #MeToo has forced deep reflection on how sex and power are represented on screen. Laura Désirée, an intimacy coordinator in New York and host of various podcasts, sees it as a “social revolution of sex that involves a renewed discourses, believing that after this phase of normalizing the discussion of sex, it’s only natural that we enter a new, experimental phase of representation on screen.”
Babygirl, for example, reverses traditional dynamic: Kidman plays a powerful woman who explores her vulnerability through sexual submission, asserting her right to pleasure without giving in to the eternal Puritan scheme of moral punishment.
“As a viewer, I sometimes want to see a film that’s enticing,” says fifty-something director Halina Reijn in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. She explains that the explicit scenes in her film dialogue with the erotic thrillers she loved in her youth, but bring “her own vision, a woman’s vision.”
The role of on-set intimacy coordinator has also transformed practices.
Schwartz of The New Yorker emphasizes another innovative aspect of Babygirl, saying “the film deals with the sexuality of a woman in her fifties, who is still beautiful but whose age is showing its effects — especially as an actress we knew when she was young — and that seems to be to be an interesting evolution of the erotic thriller. The same could be said of The Substance, starring Demi Moore, also directed by a woman.”
Psychological motivation
The role of on-set intimacy coordinator has also transformed practices. “Today, we’re often hired for insurance or regulatory compliance reasons, to protect productions from legal risks. But increasingly, we’re also brought in for our artistic flair, to enrich sex scenes with our knowledge and expertise,” Désirée explains.
These evolutions coincide with a growing desire, particularly among the younger generations, for nuanced, realistic representations of sexuality, moving away from the blueprints of 40 years ago, now deemed fantastical and predatory.
“It’s essential to integrate a cerebral dimension into representations of sexuality. Otherwise, they risk being perceived as purely gratuitous,” the intimacy coordinator says. “What really captivates is the psychology behind the sexual act, that’s what makes it a memorable moment for the viewer. That’s what cinema can offer as opposed to pornography: a psychological and emotional exploration.”
