A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller

The final day of shooting for “Babygirl,” a new erotic thriller, was devoted to a sequence that the film’s writer and director, Halina Reijn, had deliberately saved for last. In the movie, which will be released on Christmas, Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the hyper-competent C.E.O. of a robotics company, who feigns pleasure in her marriage and flirts perilously with a younger man at work until he tempts her into a kinky affair. In this scene, Romy and her paramour, Samuel (Harris Dickinson), were alone in a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, attempting to define their new dynamic. The environs were unsavory—Reijn had chosen blood-red curtains and carpeting specifically to evoke a womb—but there was a charge in the air. The end of the encounter would be the literal consummation of the couple’s mind games: Romy would orgasm.

The lead-up to this climax is long, frankly observed, and, at times, unexpectedly funny, as Samuel haltingly tries to assert dominance. Then something clicks. On set, when the moment of truth arrived, the director of photography, Jasper Wolf, crouched to capture Kidman lying on the floor, on her stomach, as Dickinson loomed over her. The first take was deemed slightly too demure, but Reijn—who turned to directing after establishing herself as one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated actresses—is practiced in the art of teasing out performances. Her advice to Kidman was cheerfully blunt: “Think of a grizzly bear.”

Reijn’s rationale, she explained later, was that a woman might instinctively restrain herself to uphold a feminine ideal; the bear prompt was shorthand for something “completely low and growly and beyond vanity.” Kidman took the note. The resulting take—a closeup that lasts for nearly three minutes—made the final cut. Its fearlessness has already been rewarded. When the movie premièred, this past summer, at the Venice Film Festival, Kidman won the prize for Best Actress. She told me recently that Reijn, in creating the role for her, “gave me something that no one’s given me.” (Last month, Kidman threw her director a forty-ninth birthday party at a Mediterranean restaurant in Tribeca, where the two shared a dance before Reijn blew out the candles.)

The intensity of their bond had been evident throughout the shoot. During production, they would hug, hold hands, and declare their love for each other; sometimes Kidman put her head in Reijn’s lap. After they wrapped for the day, the pair would stick around for an hour just to talk. “She was tender, and that’s what was required,” Kidman told me. “She’s intuitive like that. If she’d been harsh, I think I would have shut down.” Reijn rehearses and preps intensively, discusses her intentions with her cast members, then lets them loose. The process is a form of respect that also leaves room for risk. As Kidman told me, “There’s a very structured part to it—and then there’s a free fall.”

Reijn, who has dark hair, a mischievous smile, and sculptural features, is a compulsive collaborator. She attributes the habit to her background in theatre: in an ensemble, she noted, “you can’t have too much ego—you’re like a school of fish.” She spent nearly two decades performing with the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, an acclaimed company then helmed by the director Ivo van Hove, and had leading roles in everything from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” to Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.” As an actress, she found it essential to understand the entire production, not just her own part, and as a director she was determined to afford her cast the same opportunity. For “Babygirl,” her second film in English—she also directed the 2022 horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies”—she talked through the whole script with her principals one-on-one, answering questions and tailoring the screenplay more closely to each actor. When Dickinson saw her chugging caffeine one afternoon as she typed on her laptop, he said, “You shouldn’t have so much coffee”—an expression of concern that struck her as “weirdly fatherly for a young man.” She incorporated it into the script. Early in the film, Samuel offers the same reproach to Romy, and the unexpected flicker of paternalism is part of what catches her interest.

Once the screenplay was done, Reijn worked out all of the blocking firsthand, on location. Wolf, the D.P., filmed her on his iPhone as she whirled from one role to another. Then she made sure that the rest of the crew was on board with her vision. In December, 2023, she assembled a team of twenty-odd people—department heads overseeing costuming, cinematography, production design—for a highly unusual PowerPoint presentation. One of the first slides featured an infographic about the “orgasm gap” between men and women, and a survey that had become an obsession of Reijn’s: it showed that, on average, a woman takes eighteen minutes to climax at the hands of a man. (Originally, she’d wanted the scene in the hotel room to last that long, but the impracticality of this notion quickly became apparent. “I was, like, ‘Put a clock in the corner!’ ” she recalled, laughing.)

The PowerPoint functioned as a kind of mood board, featuring images from Reijn’s own life. There was a photograph of her older sister’s happy nuclear family, which had partly inspired Romy’s seemingly idyllic husband-and-two-kids existence at the movie’s outset, and a snapshot that Reijn had taken of a group of Wall Street interns in ill-fitting suits and backpacks. There were taxonomies of Romy’s sexual fantasies—such as the “daddy dom–little girl” dynamic, a B.D.S.M. subculture that typically involves a dominant man taking on a caretaker role for a submissive woman—and an explanation of the avant-garde writer Antonin Artaud’s concept of the theatre of cruelty, in which a director pointedly assaults the sensibilities of an audience. One slide read, simply, “THE OFFICE IS THE KINK.”

The presentation also included stills from such films as “9½ Weeks” and “Damage,” erotic thrillers from the nineteen-eighties and nineties that had been a revelation for the young Reijn. When we first met, over dinner, she told me that she’d watched “9½ Weeks,” the director Adrian Lyne’s earliest contribution to the genre, “like, six thousand times,” beginning in her late teens. Although the S & M-tinged dynamic between its central couple, played by Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, created a sensation in Europe, American audiences weren’t ready for it. The film was bowdlerized ahead of its U.S. release, in 1986, in response to test-screening walkouts—then bombed anyway. But, the following year, Lyne had a blockbuster with “Fatal Attraction,” which a Time cover story named “the zeitgeist hit of the decade.” (That era had something in common with this one: the Time article characterized the late eighties as a period of “retrenchment along the sexual front lines,” with “pandemic viruses imposing a puritan morality on the would-be-wild young.”) Glenn Close’s performance as an unstable editor who has improbably hot sex with a married man (Michael Douglas), then responds to being dumped by boiling his family’s pet rabbit, kidnapping his child, and attempting to murder his wife, is both indelible and representative of the genre’s absurdities. The film’s box-office success paved the way for a spate of other high-profile erotic thrillers, such as Paul Verhoeven’s “Basic Instinct.” These movies were designed to turn audiences on, but their baroque plots supplied a degree of plausible deniability, while the involvement of A-list actors lent a level of prestige: Douglas’s filmography alone includes intimate encounters with Close, Sharon Stone, and Demi Moore.

Reijn came to idolize directors like Lyne and Verhoeven, even as she recognized their limitations. “If you watch all of these movies now, there’s a lot of sexism in them,” she said. (Lyne has described the career women he vilified in his films, including Close’s bunny boiler, as “sort of overcompensating for not being men.”) But some of the kinkier dramas provided affirmation for Reijn, whose own submissive fantasies had been regarded by her therapist as something to “work through.” She told me, “ ‘9½ Weeks’ gave me the permission to even have these ideas that I thought were really bad.”

The trend faded as studios began catering more to families, and as onscreen sex became more readily available through other mediums. Lyne himself recently tried to revive the genre, with the Ben Affleck-led “Deep Water,” but the results were poor. Reijn knew that, in 2024, an erotic thriller would have to look different. “I want to use the tropes but twist them and give them a modern touch—to have fun with them, make them a little camp,” she said. While writing the script, she read books by the relationship therapist Esther Perel, and talked to people in the corporate world about the ways gender norms had shifted since the #MeToo movement. Reijn was fascinated to learn about the media training that many female C.E.O.s receive to appear palatable—and especially by the idea that vulnerability had become something to be marketed rather than denied outright.

“ ‘Babygirl’ is a fairy tale,” Reijn told me. She took pleasure in folding over-the-top circumstances and “airport novel” flourishes into her screenplay. At the same time, she wanted the film’s depiction of sex to feel true. “Sexuality is often portrayed in stories, movies, and paintings as something that is so not the reality,” she said. “It looks either very glamorous or very dark—but for me it’s insanely vulnerable, very embarrassing, and sort of stop-and-go.” The office, with its rigid hierarchies and sharp power differentials, is a rich backdrop for a dom-sub relationship. (Sophie Wilde, who plays Romy’s assistant, noted to Reijn that even her scenes with Kidman had an element of sadomasochism.) For Samuel and Romy, conference-room meetings become a zone of flirtation; a cigarette shared outside a company party turns out to be a prelude to something more.

“We’ve found a fingerprint.”

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“This movie is about identity and role-playing,” Reijn said. “As a woman, you feel so much pressure to be the mother, the lover—all these archetypes. I wanted to take this almost literally with Romy. At the beginning, you see her sexually. Then you see her as the mother with the apron. Then she’s the C.E.O.” Absurdist smash cuts between intimate marital moments and corporate speechifying heighten the sense that both the adoring wife and the chilly girlboss are forms of drag. The film calls attention to the artifice of—and the punishing effort behind—Romy’s attempts to self-optimize, which range from Botox injections to E.M.D.R. therapy. (Later, Romy’s surly teen-age daughter announces that the Botox treatment makes her mom look “like a dead fish.”) Nor does the story gloss over Romy’s capacity to manipulate: at one point, she deploys H.R.-approved rhetoric to dissuade a junior employee from pursuing Samuel, saying, with faux concern, “You’re in a position of power over him.”

“I love writing scenes like that, where the female character is corrupt, is greedy, is weak, is dark, is wrong,” Reijn said, of the exchange. Romy was the kind of part she had dreamed of for herself as a theatre actress embodying women who either lacked flaws or were punished for having them. “I’m in conversation both with the nineties sexual thrillers and with all the sort of mythical, iconic parts that I’ve played,” she told me. “I sometimes feel I’m bewitched by these roles, and making these movies almost as a response—even if nobody knows it except me—is healing.”

Reijn was born in Amsterdam in 1975, but her parents—a pair of hippie artists—swiftly transplanted her to the tiny village of Wildervank. When Reijn was growing up, their house guests included both fellow-artists and East German refugees, and her family was virtually off the grid. She and her two sisters were forbidden to watch films or television, though they were encouraged in their own creative pursuits; they painted, played music, and wore homemade clothes that became fodder for their mother’s art installations as soon as they outgrew them. The vibe, Reijn explained, “was basically ‘Midsommar,’ but not throwing old people off of cliffs.”

A breach in the no-moving-images policy proved transformative. When Reijn was six, a bored babysitter took her and her older sister to the movies to see “Annie”; she instantly decided she wanted to be an actress. Her mom helped her join a youth theatre, and her dad built a stage for her at home. “If I’d said, ‘I want to be a dentist,’ he would have built a dentist chair,” Reijn joked fondly. Soon she was writing her own plays and casting her sisters to perform alongside her.

Reijn’s parents separated when she was still young. Her father was gay; he had been open with his wife about that fact, but had believed he could “transcend” his sexuality. “In the end, he did not,” Reijn said. Looking back, she’s happy with her unorthodox childhood, which she credits with shaping her philosophy as an artist. “I don’t want to offer a moral”—an ethic that, she said, comes “purely from my parents.” She went on, “The biggest thing that they told me was always put yourself in the shoes of the other. Like, when your bike is stolen, thank the thief. That is extreme, of course, but for an actor that is amazing. . . . My nonjudgmental attitude is very handy for the work I do.”

At the time, though, Reijn found her upbringing maddeningly unstructured. Around the age of twelve, she insisted on attending a “normal” school in Amsterdam, only to be mocked mercilessly when she showed up with wooden shoes and unshaven legs. Once she adapted to the new setting, she thrived—and became obsessed with imposing order herself. When another student was insufficiently prepared, she bristled; when a teacher was lax or late, she scrawled disapproving callouts on the blackboard.

Upon graduating, she moved to Maastricht to attend drama school, which was a social education as much as a technical one. It was a strict, patriarchal environment: Reijn had to learn to walk in high heels, and her report cards advised her to wear more dresses. “It’s unimaginable now—but I enjoyed that because I had never learned it,” she said. For Reijn, conventional femininity “was super exotic.” By her second year, she’d been offered the part of Ophelia in a professional production of “Hamlet.” She accepted and never returned to school.

After moving to Amsterdam for the role, she reconnected with Carice van Houten, another young actress she’d met on the drama-school audition circuit. They soon became inseparable, and eventually shared a doctor, a dentist, a therapist, an accountant, and a gynecologist. In 2005, Reijn and van Houten—who later found international success on “Game of Thrones,” as the femme-fatale priestess Melisandre—were both cast in “Black Book,” a Dutch-language film directed by Paul Verhoeven. (The movie, a Second World War-era thriller about the Dutch Resistance, features some classic Verhoeven touches, including a scene in which van Houten bleaches her pubic hair.) The pair then got roles in a Hollywood production: Tom Cruise’s “Valkyrie.” In 2015, they founded a production company, Man Up, to make movies of their own.

Reijn began writing a film, “Instinct,” which she planned to direct, with van Houten as the star. Reijn plotted out the project in the wings of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, between repertory performances of “Mourning Becomes Electra” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” She had seen a news segment about female therapists and psychologists falling in love with male patients who’d been convicted of violent crimes. “I thought that was an incredible metaphor for doing things in life that you know are bad for you when you’re supposed to be this enlightened, smart creature,” she told me. After all, therapists “know the red flags better than anybody else.” She arrived at a polarizing premise: a cat-and-mouse sexual relationship between a prison psychologist named Nicoline, played by van Houten, and a serial rapist under her care.

Reijn shot “Instinct” in less than a month, on a tiny budget. She worked on the edit during the day and returned to the stage every night. The result was impressively nuanced. Idris, the sex offender (Marwan Kenzari), has served five years in a correctional facility and is hailed by Nicoline’s colleagues as a reformed man. It’s not immediately clear whether their chemistry makes her more, or less, capable of assessing his fitness to reënter society—and whether she’s genuinely susceptible to Idris’s manipulations or cleverly playing along in order to expose them. Guy Lodge, writing about the movie in Variety, dubbed it “the kind of hot, confrontational psychodrama you can imagine Verhoeven himself dreaming up,” even as he noted clear evidence of “a woman’s perspective behind the camera.” Among other things, Reijn decided not to linger on her heroine’s naked body. (As van Houten joked to me, alluding to her frequent nudity on “Game of Thrones,” “People have seen it by now.”)

“Instinct” was never released in U.S. theatres, but it became a calling card for potential Hollywood collaborators. Nicole Kidman sought it out on the recommendation of a friend, who’d seen it at a film festival. “It was dealing with subject matter where you’re going, ‘This is deeply uncomfortable for me—and I’m drawn in,’ ” she remembered. She reached out to Reijn, who wrote back. Soon they were calling each other for long conversations. “You get to know somebody’s voice through their work,” Kidman told me. “But then, talking to her on the phone, I just went, ‘Oh, this is a place I’ve not been.’ ”

For Reijn, “Instinct” was part of a larger crusade. The canonical roles she’d inhabited onstage had been formative; they also had dark similarities that had started to feel troubling. When we met again, at the Morgan Library, in October, she said, “I’ve been counting how many of those characters kill themselves, and how many of them go psychotic. It’s almost all!” Whispering to match the hush of the library, but undeniably animated, she tallied up the outcomes: Ophelia drowns; Hedda Gabler shoots herself; Electra plots the murder of her own mother. Nora, the heroine of “A Doll’s House,” is a rare exception: “She walks out.”

From the moment Reijn left drama school for “Hamlet,” she began noticing her characters’ limitations. When she complained, with youthful indignation, that Ophelia had “only five scenes,” the play’s director, Theu Boermans, promised that their next collaboration would be “her Hamlet.” By this he meant Lulu, the protagonist of a pair of plays by the nineteenth-century German dramatist Frank Wedekind. (Modern productions often combine the two.) Lulu is rescued from the streets by an upper-class man and remakes herself according to the desires of her admirers. One suitor knows her as Mignon; another calls her Eve. Lulu, inevitably, meets a brutal end—first reduced to prostitution, then murdered by Jack the Ripper. “She’s onstage for five hours, and all her clients come in, and she just transforms,” Reijn said. It was a showcase for her range—but the character’s lack of interiority rankled. “When Hamlet is alone onstage, he has ‘To be or not to be,’ ” she pointed out. When a man questions Lulu about her core beliefs, she collapses into a litany of “I don’t know”s.

A copy of “Lulu,” we’d learned, was somewhere in the Morgan; Reijn inquired with a docent, who directed us toward a room with three levels of bookshelves and an intricate painted ceiling. We stopped in front of an object on display—a pocket edition of “On the Secrets of Women,” a Latin work of medieval natural philosophy, which had been printed in Amsterdam. Reijn peered at a placard informing us that the text underscored “the pernicious nature of women” and had helped fuel the prosecution of witchcraft. “I need to read this book!” she exclaimed, adding wryly, “It’s very small to contain all the secrets of all women.”

We wandered into the next room, which had ornate red wallpaper and stained-glass windows. There was no sign of Lulu there, either. Reijn cast a regretful eye over rows of books behind an iron grate. “She might just be locked up!” she said.

Reijn had seen an Ivo van Hove production of “Lulu” at thirteen, seated beside her increasingly horrified mother. (“She was a hippie, but there was a lot of nudity,” Reijn recalled blithely.) Riveted by the experience, Reijn sent a long letter to van Hove, introducing herself and noting that she’d wanted to be an actress since she was six. “I feel that I might be of use for you, and I would like to audition to join your group,” she wrote, explaining that the staging had touched “the core of life.”

“It just gave me oxygen,” Reijn told me. “I felt, ‘I need to find this man, because then I can breathe.’ ” She laughed. “Well, I never heard from him!”

She was twenty-five when she had her turn as Lulu, in a production directed by Boermans. Van Hove was in the audience, and after the performance he approached her and asked, matter-of-factly, “So, when are you coming?”

The years Reijn spent at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam shaped her as both an actor and a director. She and van Hove, she said, had an instant connection, because they were both fixated on themes of “control and surrender and violence and sex.” She respected his expectation that everyone in the ensemble would subjugate themselves to the play. “He was always very businesslike,” she said. “I kind of loved that, because I could be like this”—she tossed her hair dramatically—“and I knew that the work would be structured.”

The company’s interpretations of classic texts were not without controversy. “The way we portrayed them, there was kind of a masochism, you know?” Reijn said. She chafed at any suggestion that her characters, whose willingness to obliterate themselves for love was out of keeping with modern mores, should be presented with a wink. “I would never play that with irony, because I have that in me,” she said. Reijn’s Hedda was unkempt and suicidal from the start; her habit of toying with the people around her—and with her husband’s pistols—suggested a death wish. (For Reijn, Hedda, not Lulu, is “the female Hamlet.”) Jude Law was so struck by the troupe’s “Hedda Gabler” that he eventually offered himself up to van Hove, too, and went on to star opposite Reijn in the director’s 2017 adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film, “Obsession.” Law, who is now a close friend of Reijn’s, said, “She shone out of that group. I’ve never seen anyone so commanding, so comfortable and fearless onstage.”

Reijn’s most personal collaboration with van Hove was an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s one-woman drama, “The Human Voice.” The monologue, first staged in 1930, consists of one side of a phone call between a nameless heroine and her ex. In the course of the conversation, it becomes clear that the man has left her abruptly to marry someone else—and that she has been utterly destabilized by the split. When the Toneelgroep Amsterdam first staged it, in 2009, Reijn herself was in the midst of a breakup with a fellow-actor and musician. She normally wore dresses to rehearsals; one day, deeply depressed, she arrived in Adidas sweatpants and a ratty sweater emblazoned with Mickey and Minnie Mouse. “Ivo was, like, ‘Perfect!’ ” Reijn told me. The outfit became her costume for the show.

The production was a testament to Reijn’s ability as an actress. Her character initially puts on a brave face, but she begins shifting between solicitous, confiding tones and flashes of rage or despair as she attempts to keep her lover on the line. In van Hove’s version, the man seems to have hung up before the woman’s final, furious soliloquy—if he was ever there at all. The action is set in a New York high-rise, and when the “conversation” is truly over Reijn opens a sliding glass panel that has separated her from the audience. Before a blackout, she stands on the precipice, poised to jump.

Reijn played the role on and off for a decade, and her performance changed as real-life boyfriends came and went. In her mind, she said, “I would always be on the phone with a different man.” Spectators, too, could “project their own relationships into those empty spaces,” and people responded strongly wherever the play went—Barcelona, Toronto, Hong Kong, Dublin, Sydney.

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At first, the rigors of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s repertory schedule thrilled Reijn. She prided herself on her ability to memorize lines, and to recall blocking whenever the company revived a production; her colleagues nicknamed her the Machine. As she got older, though, the parts became jumbled: “I would say, ‘I love you,’ which is a sentence that is in every classical play, and I was, like, Wait—who am I saying this to?” In her late thirties, she developed stagefright for the first time. “It had been my safest place,” she said, of the theatre. “Safer than reality. And when that started to turn on me, that was really scary.”

Early in the pandemic, she and van Hove revived “The Human Voice.” The nature of the production—a solo show in which Reijn was literally walled off from human contact—made it both relatively COVID-friendly and intensely isolating. Privately, she knew that the run would be her last. On the night of the final performance, she texted a few close friends to say that she was done with acting. Then she got onstage and prepared to make her leap.

During the pandemic, A24, the indie studio behind such hits as “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Lady Bird,” was experiencing its own challenges. Executives there, like Kidman, had been fixated on Reijn since seeing “Instinct,” in 2019, on the festival circuit. Then COVID hit, and moviemaking ground to a halt. By early 2021, A24 had managed to shoot only one new film—the Ti West horror flick “X”—in the relative safety of New Zealand. The company’s first chance to resume production in the U.S. came in the form of a chamber piece that could be filmed in a single location: a bloody Gen Z satire, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” about a house party at which one guest after another turns up dead. A staffer at A24 proposed that Reijn, with her theatre background, might be the person to direct it.

She accepted the job, which included overhauling the script, originally by the writer Kristen Roupenian, in partnership with the playwright Sarah DeLappe. In early 2021, before vaccines had been introduced, Reijn moved to New York City with the help of the studio, which had secured an artist’s visa to get her into the country. Almost immediately, she wanted to go back to Holland. “There were cockroaches everywhere,” she recalled. “I was homesick.” She’d had an amicable but painful breakup with a long-term boyfriend, who was still in Amsterdam. Recounting this period to me, she put on a singsong voice, in a parody of her own naïveté: “I thought, When I arrive in America, A24 will be waiting for me at the airport, and they will all take me to dinner—but it was COVID! I saw them only through Zoom. I was still working on the script. I have never felt so alone.”

She finally got to collaborate again when filming began—at a mansion in Chappaqua, New York. She bonded with her young actors, working with them as if they were in a small drama troupe, and their conversations helped enliven the screenplay, which is deliciously quotable. (As the twentysomethings bicker about who has it worse in life, one cuts through another’s ostensible rags-to-riches narrative with a withering pronouncement: “Your parents are upper . . . middle . . . class.”) The experience left Reijn with an enduring interest in Gen Z sensibilities. “They do, sometimes, have better ideas about self-love, about sexuality, about identity,” she said. The age gap in “Babygirl” allows for sly observations about such generational differences. Romy’s husband, played by Antonio Banderas, winces at her fantasies, not wanting to “feel like a villain,” whereas Samuel flatly declares such hangups to be “dated”; in his view, it’s actually progressive to humiliate Romy, if that’s what she wants.

“Babygirl” is one of several recent films centered on affairs between a woman and a much younger man—some of them disturbing (“May December”), others romanticized (“The Idea of You”). Reijn had wanted Samuel to be a counterintuitive love interest as well as a forbidden one. In contrast to the more conventionally masculine Banderas (“Someone where the audience is, like, ‘Stay the fuck with him!’ ”), Dickinson plays “someone who is incredibly vulnerable and also confused about what is expected of him,” Reijn said. “As a lot of men are right now.” The corporate environment adds to the sense of taboo, and creates a double-edged threat: though Romy holds sway over Samuel, he can just as readily derail her career by revealing their arrangement.

“Babygirl” not only allowed Reijn to engage more deeply with preoccupations from her previous films; it also gave her another chance to square what she called the “Lulu force” of self-destruction and the desire for personal liberation. “I was just sitting there behind my computer, thinking, What is the juiciest, most layered part I can make for an actress?” Reijn told me. Kidman read an early draft. It was, Reijn said, “an immediate yes.”

In November, I visited Reijn at her West Village apartment, where she lived while filming “Babygirl” in the city. (She’d moved out of the place with the cockroaches.) When I arrived, she was dressed in a cropped pink sweatshirt and finishing up a phone call with a Dutch friend, attempting to confirm that everyone who needed a ticket to the movie’s upcoming Amsterdam première had received one. Once she hung up, she gave me a tour, starting with a spare room crowded with bright canvases. Since childhood, she’s kept up the habit of painting, and she still finds the practice cathartic. She often gives her work away, though she’s wary of pressuring friends into accepting it. “I put them in people’s houses without telling them, so they can throw them away if they don’t like them,” she explained.

The narrow hallway to her bedroom—pink linen sheets, frilled pillows, a well-worn Teddy bear—doubled as a kitchen, where she set about slicing fresh ginger for tea as a kettle boiled. Her refrigerator was adorned with a program for “The Human Voice.” Once the tea was made, we settled in the living room, at a table stacked high with books, notepads, and plays. She gestured at a box of pastries that she’d picked up. “We need to eat some chocolate!” she said, then hastened to add, “Only if you want to.”

The centerpiece of the room was a fireplace, with playbills, works of art, and photographs of friends and family propped up on the mantle. She pointed to a black-and-white image of a young girl flanked by dour adults; behind them, a skeleton is mounted on a crucifix. “This is my dad, my mom, and me—I was scared,” she said, laughing. There were also pictures of her sisters, whom she affectionately calls “good witches.” Whereas Reijn had embraced the life of an unmarried artist, they had sought more traditional stability, and she occasionally envied their domesticity. At dinner, she’d told me, “Creating a movie like ‘Babygirl’ is all-consuming. At the same time, when you finish it, that’s when you’re, like, ‘Hello! Where’s my dog? Where’s my station wagon? Where’s my child?’ ” Although she was somewhat reluctantly swiping on dating apps, she wasn’t seeing anyone at the moment. “I’m living as a nun,” she joked. “I thought I was doing this film to activate myself! But that hasn’t happened yet.”

When Reijn grows disillusioned with single life, her siblings lovingly remind her of the less glamorous aspects of raising a family. “Part of me thinks that I’m not a real woman because I don’t have children,” she confessed—a dark thought that, she told me, might inform her next film. “I would love to do something with that pain, and then, on the other side of that spectrum, with the pain of women who are mothers and feel that they missed out on life in society or a life of creativity or a life of freedom.”

She had already written treatments for a number of potential new projects, and she spoke of the ideas in gestational terms. “I have a couple of embryos,” she said. “But I’m not sure which one is the one.” Lately, she said, she’d become obsessed with the question of what it means to be an American man today—not just for liberal twentysomethings, like Samuel, but also for the many men who had recently voted for Donald Trump. “But there’s a little voice inside of me, if I’m deadly honest with you, that says, ‘Should you be doing a movie about men right now?’ ”

“Babygirl” is laced with theatrical references—Romy’s husband is a director staging a distinctly van Hove-ish take on “Hedda Gabler”—and Reijn may yet return to her roots more directly. Five translations of “A Doll’s House” were sprawled on her living-room table. Flipping through one version, I found the beginnings of a pitch scrawled in the margins: “ ‘Marie Antoinette’ meets ‘Lady Macbeth’ meets ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire.’ ” At the end of Act I, she’d written a question that might have been posed by Nora herself: “When you step away from the mother role, who are you as a woman?”

When we were at the Morgan Library, she’d told me, “I would love to do ‘A Doll’s House,’ but my way—with my own anger.” She’d been reading about what women in the nineteenth century had put themselves through in the name of beauty. One practice particularly haunted her: swallowing tapeworm eggs in a bid to lose weight. (Sometimes, she informed me, live tapeworms would be extracted from the women’s mouths.) Reijn said that she wanted to depict a character submitting to such gruesome measures “and make it almost horror—because it is almost horror.” She smiled. “And then, of course, she frees herself.” ♦