How ‘Babygirl,’ ‘The Substance’ and ‘The Room Next Door’ Fight Against Society’s Standards for Women

The news is full of stories about people fighting back at attempted restrictions and limitations to women’s bodies. In Hollywood, the same can be said for some of the films in this year’s awards race.

Director and co-writer Pedro Almodóvar’s brilliantly colored “The Room Next Door” stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as estranged friends who reconnect when the latter’s character opts for euthanasia instead of slowly and painfully succumbing to cancer. Director-writer Marielle Heller’s metaphoric black comedy-horror “Nightbitch” is an adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel about motherhood, in which a harried yet loving mom (Amy Adams) transforms into a dog as she increasingly loses her own identity while raising her young son.

Writer-director Halina Reijn’s sexy psychological drama “Babygirl,” which stars Nicole Kidman, goes into the power of being the submissive one in a sexual relationship. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s dark comedy “The Substance,” which stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, discusses the double standards of youth and beauty. And writer-director Caroline Lindy’s horror rom-com “Your Monster,” which stars Melissa Barrera, puts a face (and body) to the secret, simmering rage that women are taught to suppress.

“A lot of [these] things you’re told to keep inside, to not show, to be ashamed of, to dissimulate, to hide,” Fargeat says. “I wanted to do the exact opposite; to let everything out in a very brutal and obvious way because I think that’s what we need right now.”

She prefers to describe her movie, about an aging actor who is given access to a mysterious injectable that will transform her into a younger woman for a few days, as a genre film instead of horror. “Horror, for me, is more something that is scary,” she says, adding that calling it “genre” still allows her to discuss topics like the societal and professional pressures for women to behave and be polite “without having to be delicate” about it.

Interestingly, it’s not a woman who tells Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle about the secret organization giving out the substance; it’s a man. Fargeat says she didn’t realize she’d made this editorial decision while writing the script but that it makes sense because the neon-green formula turns you into “the version [of yourself] that men want you to look like.”

The film’s climax sees Moore’s Elisabeth become almost what would happen if Pablo Picasso had been charged with creating a real-life rendition of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Her body, now frail and brittle, is also contorted and rearranged. The parts that were once sexualized by the male gaze are warped and placed on the head. But also on display are cellulite, wrinkles and other things that women are taught to keep hidden.

Reijn’s “Babygirl” also comments on the changing views of sex, sexism and even sex workers. Kidman’s Romy is a high-ranking corporate executive who has never felt sexually fulfilled in her marriage to her otherwise awesome husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). She submits to a consensual affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson), in part because of the danger this presents to her career and reputation.

“We are talking in this movie about topics like shame, power, sexuality and the workplace, so it was very important to me that all the discussions that I had with myself in my own household would also be in the movie,” Reijn says. “I don’t provide any answers. I’m just trying to make a tribute to female liberation. But it was very important to have all the different point of views and to see that some women are drawn to a sexual game of being humiliated because they are afraid to enjoy themselves. It’s kind of like they’re saying, ‘When a man is dominant, it’s not my fault that I enjoy sexuality.’”

Making the “Babygirl” male leads contrasting ages also allows Reijn to look at generation-based stigmas. Toward the end of the film, Banderas’ character remarks that women’s interests in sadomasochism aren’t real and are simply a male construct.

Meanwhile, Dickinson’s character represents a more Gen Z view that female submission is both very much a thing and can be very liberating. Reijn also acknowledges that this character’s costumes, hair and makeup don’t make him conventionally attractive but rather have him styled in a way of the so-called “hot rodent man” aesthetic associated with younger Hollywood It Guys like Jeremy Allen White, Barry Keoghan and Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist from “Challengers” — another film released this year that mixes the worlds of sex and power and with its own domineering and flawed heroine (Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan).

“I also really wanted to make a movie about masculinity and about the confusion that especially younger men might have about — ‘What am I supposed to be? How am I supposed to behave?’” Reijn says. “What I love about this new generation of men is that they have a gentleness that I really am intrigued by. And they grew up in a world in which consent is way more normal than when I was young … We didn’t make him an archetypical dom. We really tried to make him also vulnerable and exploring things and trying to ask himself the question ‘Who am I as a man?’”

“Your Monster” filmmaker Lindy didn’t have to delve too deep to hit the source material for her story; she really did get both dumped and a cancer diagnosis soon after she graduated college. Unlike Barrera’s Laura, however, she didn’t also lose the lead role in her ex’s new musical and return to her childhood bedroom to find that there’s a monster living (and, in fact, has always lived) in her closet.

“Over the course of my 20s, when I started thinking about this idea, it was really a moment where I developed a strong relationship with my anger and I started to love that side of myself that had been dormant up until that point,” she says during a Zoom interview that, fittingly, happens when she’s in her childhood bedroom. “Instead of feeling shame about my rage … it transformed me in a way and it made me the person I am today.”

“Your Monster” is also a love story, albeit a unique one. “The character of Monster is a manifestation of her inner rage,” says Lindy, an avowed rom-com fan. “I was taking those classic rom-com tropes where it’s like the jerky guy, as Monster was initially, and playing into that classic character stereotype. But it’s really this part of herself that she doesn’t really like; that she doesn’t know very well.”

And Monster is also kind of handsome, as far as monsters go. Lindy and her team, which included Oscar-winning makeup artist David Anderson, were inspired by all three of the friends Dorothy Gale meets on her journey down the yellow-brick road in “The Wizard of Oz” as well as the Beast in both the animated Disney film “Beauty and the Beast” and its Broadway adaptation.

And how did the #MeToo movement affect their stories? Reijn says she “felt so liberated, and, literally, felt so much safer” after the #MeToo movement. She describes her film as “almost a comedy of manners, if you will; a fable about these themes.” Meanwhile, Fargeat says she wasn’t motivated as much by that movement as she was the backlash to it. Lindy says that though she began writing “Your Monster” around 2018, she didn’t consciously connect her screenplay to the #MeToo movement until now, because hers isn’t a story of sexual assault or objectification. Rather, she says, it’s a reminder that when “women come together, being angry and saying we’re sick of this, [you should] be scared. When we come together, we can kill you.”

Well, not everyone, she clarifies. Just the evil ex-boyfriends who deserve it.