‘Babygirl’ is a curiously inert drama which at first sight appears to be a modern post-#MeToo twist on the sort of 90s erotic thrillers that Hollywood was so adept at delivering. In those days, such films lacked a political edge – they were essentially made in a vacuum with nothing particularly consequential to say about the politics or ideology of an age. We had stand alone, transgressive types, epitomized by Catherine Tramell in ‘Basic Instinct’, who we admired precisely because there was no one who really looked or acted like them in the real world.

But, ‘Babygirl’ gives us an unsubtle commentary on #MeToo politics, this time asking the question of what would happen if it was a woman at the top of an organization who subjects her male underlings to an abuse of her position. Unlike the similarly-themed ‘Disclosure’ in 1994, however, Nicole Kidman’s Romy is a far less villainous figure. That film simply reversed the genders, with a strong female taking advantage of the sort of character, played by Michael Douglas, who would normally be the one in a position of power or authority in the films of that era. ‘Babygirl’ offers the far more complex threads whereby the collision of two people, one with power and one without power, are not so much subverted, or even inverted, but where both simply collide.

The male intern, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), knows which buttons to press, and we suspect that he is gaslighting his female boss, turning up in her office or home in order to seduce her, but she too is not un-amenable to being taunted and played. He makes it clear that he is up for being the dominant and she the submissive one in a sexual relationship, which leads to scenes of the two of them cavorting in different spaces in work and in hotel rooms where they are always at risk of being found out. What then follows is a far more nuanced and complicated dynamic than Hollywood used to give us… but at a price. For at the expense of giving us something that tries so hard to be even-handed and multifaceted it ends up evaporating before our eyes.

It is all so relentlessly bland, in a way that will come as a disappointment to anyone expecting a Joe Eszterhas-type formula. Samuel has no backstory and the whole film feels corporate and by-the-numbers, as though it thinks it is more transgressive than it is. For a film that begins by showing us Nicole Kidman leaving a sexual experience with her husband in order to masturbate to porn on her laptop, the sinking feeling arrives very early on that everything is going downhill from this point. They are characters who have wandered in from a 90s erotic thriller, stumbled into a corporate and HR-driven workspace and had the life sucked out of them by it.