Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I don’t know if anyone else will call Baby girldirected by Dutch actress Halina Reijn, a feel-good film. But, boy, it made me feel good.

It’s the story of a powerful, married, middle-aged CEO and mother, Rory (Nicole Kidman), who decides to live out her secret sadomasochistic sexual fantasies with Samuel (Harris Dickenson), a young stud – who happens to be her intern. In other words, our heroine is a bad, bad baby. You moralists will be happy to know that she doesn’t get away with her transgressions scot-free. She suffers from deep emotional conflict and the real danger of losing everything she holds dear.

But huzzah! She doesn’t die. In fact, the film ends with an intimate close-up of a satisfied smile, and it’s post-coital and it’s hers.

I think this is a small triumph of modern cinema.

Think of the outcome of other films about women who have the courage to risk what they want, be it in terms of their looks, their sexual desires or their careers. Last The substanceWidely touted as a wry feminist tale that mocks the debilitating limitations of Hollywood beauty culture, it kills its heroine (Demi Moore) in the cruelest and most punishing of ways. (More of what I have to say here.) Or how about the highly respected conductor (Cate Blanchett) in tar Who slowly loses her mind before her various embezzlements reduce her to conducting a humiliating, ragtag orchestra of cosplayers?

As we watch Samuel intrude more and more intrusively into Rory’s life, it becomes clear that he is a predator, which fits well with Rory’s submissive fantasies. The guy is hot and pretty strange, and shows several hints of the possible effects of his dark sexual power: For one thing, he wears a gold necklace that makes him look kind of “street” under his corporate suit. Even more worrying, he bears a tattoo of a black-hooded angel on his torn flank, apparently wielding a rifle (rather than the traditional bow and arrow). In various hotel rooms, Rory submits to his demands by standing in a corner facing the wall, getting on all fours and sipping milk from a saucer on the floor, which – is that just me? – seems kind of tame in the BDSM world. But for Rory, used to being the boss girl, it represents a loss of power that she finds irresistibly arousing. Whenever things get really heated between them, the camera is almost always focused on Rory’s face, portrait-like, so that everything Samuel does to her fades into the background. (Could you convincingly do that like you’re having a volcanic orgasm while the camera is focused on your face? I think Kidman deserves an Oscar for these scenes alone.)