Spoilers ahead for the plots of Nosferatu and Babygirl.
This holiday season, we all have the chance to watch a Christmas movie that uses repressed sexual fantasies to dig deep (so deep) on gender dynamics, societal expectations, and the relationship between self-acceptance and desire. The only question is, which one will you choose — Babygirl or Nosferatu?
The art of the stealth Christmas movie is as abstract as it is delicate. There’s no one way to make a Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie; over the years, the canon has grown to include everything from capers to kids’ movies. Nicole Kidman helped pioneer the art of the erotic Christmas movie in Eyes Wide Shut, and this year, she’s back with Babygirl — in which she plays a tech CEO who has an affair with a junior colleague because while she’s secretly kink-curious, her husband seems like the kind of guy who insists on calling sex “making love.†Meanwhile, in Nosferatu, Lily-Rose Depp is a Victorian Cassandra — a young woman whose spiritual (and sexual) connection to the supernatural world annoys her husband and friends.
On the surface, these movies don’t have much in common besides their December 25 release dates and the quiet use of Christmas trees as seasonal markers. Dig a little deeper, and you might notice that they’re telling similar stories with very different approaches and even more disparate conclusions. But if you ask me — and so far, no one has — only one of these movies captures the true meaning of Christmas.
The case for Babygirl
In Babygirl, all Nicole Kidman wants for Christmas is a good orgasm. Her character, Romy, runs a robotics company called Tensile (lol), and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), is a theater director. Right off the bat, these two represent a clash between worlds: Romy, who likes cold plunges and replacing human workers with robots, stands in for the brave, materialistic new world, and Jacob, who quietly worries that he’s becoming “irrelevant†both at work and at home, symbolizes the old, creative, spiritual world. From the very beginning, when Romy fake-climaxes with soft, feminine moans only to run down the hall, masturbate to pornography, and grunt out a real one, we know that these two are struggling to connect.
Feelings of emotional isolation are a hallmark of both the real-life holidays and the movies they inspire. Consider George Bailey’s suicidal despair at the start of It’s a Wonderful Life; Charlie Brown’s struggle to feel appropriately happy in A Charlie Brown Christmas; Kathleen Kelly’s grief from missing her mother in You’ve Got Mail; Kevin McAllister’s hatred for his family in Home Alone. The list goes on and on and on, and the unifying theme is the same: The holidays are an excellent time for an existential crisis.
More often than not, our disaffected leads respond to their sadness by toying with the idea of turning their lives upside down. George Bailey nearly kills himself before a guardian angel shows him what his hometown would be like without him; Charlie Brown steps out of his comfort zone to direct a play; Kathleen Kelly flirts with a pen pal while questioning her relationship with a New York Observer columnist played by Greg Kinnear; Kevin McAllister (unintentionally and then gleefully) tests out life without his huge family. In Babygirl, Romy starts an affair with an intern. As she herself acknowledges, their relationship is hot because it could potentially blow up her entire life as she knows it — her marriage, her job, everything.
A less interesting version of this movie might cast Romy’s paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), as a confident dom who sweeps her into his thrall, but writer-director Halina Reijn refuses us such black-and-white simplicity. Samuel and Romy’s first tryst is one of the funniest scenes in the movie because it’s an awkward struggle to figure out rules and expectations. Neither of them seems to have done anything quite like this before. Samuel isn’t a helpless victim or a sexual savant, just like Romy isn’t a predator or a helpless masochist (although her husband does hold some fascinating ideas about female masochism). Instead, Romy and Samuel seem to find in one another exactly what they want — an accepting, empathetic sexual partner who’s game to bring all of their strange fantasies to life. Jacob has the theater, and Romy, who spends most of her day playing the part of Strong, Confident Woman, has a series of hotel rooms.
But as often happens when Christmas movie characters act out their fantasies, the result is not quite what Romy imagined. When things inevitably blow up and Jacob finds out, he casts her out of their Manhattan apartment to live in their country house. (As anyone who’s watched a Hallmark movie knows, Christmas-movie leads must travel to a rural setting to discover their heart’s truest desires.) Ultimately, she realizes what she knew all along but couldn’t admit: She doesn’t want to end her marriage. She just wants to find the safety within it to voice what she truly wants.
At first, Jacob thinks female masochism is a male fantasy. Ultimately, however, he realizes that by denying Romy’s sexual fantasies, he’s actually been refusing her the agency she wants and deserves in their relationship. In the end, we see the couple having the kind of sex Romy has wanted from the beginning. And isn’t that really what most Christmas movies are about — realizing that the answer to all of your unfulfilled desires was sitting right next to you all along? God bless us, everyone.
The case for Nosferatu
Now, on to the Gothic horror set in Victorian-era Germany. Unlike Romy, whose husband can’t quite stomach her sexual desires at first, Lily-Rose Depp’s character in Nosferatu, Ellen, struggles with a partner who rejects her sexual advances because he’s too busy chasing money.
Okay, okay — to be fair, that only happens one time. Still, given how early on in the proceedings Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) rejects his new wife’s plea for more time in bed, it’s significant table-setting. While Ellen laments that their honeymoon was too short, Thomas brushes cat hair off his vest and gently tells his silly, horny wife that he’s running late for a big meeting. Sigh. Maybe he’d be more attentive if he knew that she’d just woken up from a sexy dream about an ancient, malevolent spirit?
While Babygirl largely plays with the tropes of traditional yuletide cinema, Nosferatu sinks its teeth deeper into Christian themes and imagery — and not just by showing off a Christmas tree and playing “O Tannenbaum†from a music box. Ellen, who first connects with the evil Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) by crying out to “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, spirit of any celestial sphere,†moans and writhes whenever he makes contact in her dreams. Her eyes tend to close or roll back, and at times, her contact-free pleasure mimics the release seen in statues like the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
The imagery is part of a bigger symbolic whole. Much like the Virgin Mary, who was touched by the Lord in ways her community could not understand, Ellen finds herself strangely connected to the supernatural plane. While Mary wound up inexplicably pregnant, Ellen finds herself tantalized by a monstrous entity who calls to her in her sleep and says ominously carnivorous things like, “You are not for the living.â€
Then again, maybe Ellen is really more of a Christ figure. She might not perform miracles, but as she tells Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), she’s always been a little … different. For instance, she says, “I always knew the contents of my Christmas gifts.†And when her husband makes his way to Romania to deliver client papers to Count Orlok and secure his position at the real-estate firm where he works as an assistant, she begs him not to go because she knows already that the trip is doomed. Later on, the professor reveals that Ellen is part of a larger prophecy in which she must sacrifice herself by laying with the beast (in this case, Orlok) until sunrise to save humankind. “In the heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis,†he tells her. “Yet, in this strange and modern world, your purpose is of greater worth. You are our salvation.†In that moment, Ellen’s wide black bonnet almost looks like a Goth halo.
But like so many great prophets before her, Ellen is not so well received in her time. Thomas treats her visions like childish delusions; Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a friend whom Thomas basically appoints as Ellen’s male guardian while he’s away, hires a doctor who prescribes such treatments as drugging Ellen with ether, stuffing her into a corset, and tying her to the bed. (You know, that tried-and-true trifecta.) Even Ellen’s lifelong best friend, Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), eventually grows tired of her doomsaying. “For the sake of the children,†she pleads, “Christmastide is upon us. Why must you remain so exasperatingly contrarian?†As someone who has also been told more than once to stop being such a bummer around the holidays, I found this devastatingly relatable. But imagine how much worse it would be if you were correctly predicting the apocalypse and everyone kept telling you to smile more.
The Ellen-as-Christ metaphor goes further, too. Just like Judas sold Jesus out for a bag of coins and sealed it with a kiss, Thomas unwittingly signs his wife over to Orlok for a sack of bullion. Sure, Judas did it on purpose while Thomas did it by signing a document he couldn’t read, but in some ways, isn’t Thomas’s infraction even worse? Imagine finding out your husband transferred his vows over to some random, rotting stranger, all because he was too eager to secure the bag to get a sketchy document translated. This is not how you secure a job in real estate.
At this point, you may be thinking: Laura, you do realize that the Christmas story ends when Jesus is still a baby, right? To that I say, first of all, my religious upbringing mostly consisted of watching the Jesus of Nazareth VHS box set a few times, so truthfully, no, I forgot that. But more importantly, I’d argue that Nosferatu is still a Christmas movie because it’s a story about overtly Christian themes and art while unraveling a yarn in which people act like assholes toward a budding prophet — which is, in fact, the same introduction that baby Jesus got to the world. It’s not a perfect 1:1, but hey, even biopics take some liberties.
The verdict
So, as we’ve clearly established, both Babygirl and Nosferatu are, indeed, Christmas movies. But which one’s the better yuletide classic? Obviously, it’s really a matter of taste. But for me, Babygirl is the clear winner. I generally prefer a more oblique Christmas tale, and also, using a woman as a sacrificial lamb who must fornicate her way into an early grave for the sake of humanity just feels a little too … I don’t know … puritanical for my tastes.
Ultimately, Babygirl’s strength as a Christmas movie comes from its ending, which centers on forgiveness of a different kind. Throughout the film, we see that Romy and her daughter Isabel (Esther Rose McGregor) share a kind of mutual understanding. Romy doesn’t chastise her daughter for cheating on her girlfriend, or for smoking in the house, or for being a sourpuss during a family Christmas portrait session. She meets her where she is — asks her how she feels about the girl she cheated with; bums a drag from her cigarette; politely asks her to change outfits. And when Isabel visits Romy at the country house, where she’s living in exile for her sins, she doesn’t flame her mother for her infidelity. Instead, she simply asks her to come home. She also shares something curious: Ever since he found out about his wife’s infidelity, Jacob’s been reading the Bible.
One could interpret this as a man retreating into religious conservatism, but it turns out that Jacob’s Bible studies have led him toward a more fundamental lesson (one that probably would’ve struck close to home for Joseph when he doubted Mary’s whole “immaculate conception†story): Forgiveness is everything. By letting go of his anger and embracing the opportunity to ask Romy what she truly needs, Jacob makes them both whole. If that’s not a reason to deck the halls, I don’t know what is.