VENICE - Nicole Kidman said she felt "exposed and vulnerable" as erotic thriller "Babygirl" premiered at the Venice Film Festival, with the veteran actor pushing herself far from her comfort zone.
Kidman plays Romy, a high-powered New York CEO who embarks on a torrid, sado-masochistic affair with a new company intern, played by Harris Dickinson, risking her marriage to her husband (Antonio Banderas) and family life.
"This definitely leaves me exposed and vulnerable and frightened and all of those things when it's given to the world, but making it with these people here, it was delicate and intimate and very, very deep," Kidman told a press conference ahead of the premiere.
"Right now we're all a bit nervous."
One of 21 films in the main competition for the Golden Lion prize, "Babygirl" is the third film for Dutch director Halina Reijn, who also wrote the script.
Early reviews were mostly positive, with Variety calling Kidman "fearless" in the film that captures "something genuine about women's erotic experience in the age of control" and IndieWire calling the film a "sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work".
The film manages to subvert the seemingly dated erotic genre, whose heyday in the 1980s and 90s produced films such as "Fatal Attraction", "Basic Instinct" and "9 1/2 Weeks".
"I'm very delighted to be able to make a film about female desire but it's also a film about a woman in an existential crisis and it has many layers," said Reijn.
That was the interest for Kidman, who in 1999 delved into the genre with her then-husband Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," similarly an in-depth look at sexuality and the human psyche.
"I want to examine human beings," Kidman said Friday.
"I want to examine women onscreen, I want to examine what it means to be human and in all facets of that and the labyrinth of that," she said.