Interns, vampires and a nice piece of Bacon – what to see and do this week

What else is January for but hunkering down with a good book or film, spinning out the time till payday? If your Christmas spending has just about left you with the price of a cinema ticket, there’s plenty on offer to enjoy this week.

Possibly the most provocative is Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman as a powerful corporate high-flyer who gets involved in a clandestine relationship with a company intern.

Once again, Kidman gives a fierce and fearless performance, this time as the comfortably married Romy, casting off personal inhibitions, societal expectations and a loving spouse to unleash her deepest sexual desires with a much younger man (a very watchable Harris Dickinson as Samuel).

Sex and relationship therapist Chantal Gautier expertly identifies and explores three central themes in the film: the power dynamics of workplace relationships; sexual desire and BDSM (the three pairings of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism); and the fall-out from infidelity.

Gautier finds that Babygirl’s Dutch director, Halina Reijn, beautifully captures the consensual role-playing between the pair, as the intensity of Romy’s sexual awakening grows. Naturally, the film is garnering much attention and Kidman is to be applauded for her willingness to embrace such a challenging and controversial role. It would be easy to dismiss the film as middle-aged female fantasy territory, but Reijn offers an unflinching – and often neglected – perspective on female sexual desire.

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The film got us wondering whether there is enough representation of middle-aged sexuality on screen. Answer our poll here to let us know your thoughts. And let us know in the comments your favourite Nicole Kidman film. My colleague Naomi loves her in Practical Magical and Moulin Rouge.

Babygirl is in cinemas now

Read more: Babygirl’s provocative exploration of power, infidelity and eroticism – reviewed by a sex therapist

The horror and the pain

If you want to blast away the cobwebs of the old year, then how about scaring yourself witless watching Nosferatu, a good old-fashioned piece of spine-tingling gothic?

It’s just over a century since Max Schreck’s terrifyingly taloned silhouette crept up a staircase to take his place as one of the earliest – and most memorable – horror film icons. Now, the pointy-eared German vampire with teeth and fingernails to match gets a Hollywood makeover from director Robert Eggers, with the help of a blood-curdling Bill Skarsgård and luminous Lily-Rose Depp.

And while the trailer undoubtedly has a whiff of 1992’s unintentionally hilarious Dracula, which featured a scenery-chewing Gary Oldman and a comically miscast Keanu Reeves, our reviewer (and horror fan) Megen de Bruin-Molé loved Nosferatu.

Describing it as “a beautiful film brimming with slow terror and unease”, she acknowledges it is rather camp and perhaps a little overlong. Who cares? She had me at “slow terror”, so sign me up for some nerve-jangling tension and thrilling jump scares.

Nosferatu is in cinemas now

Read more: Robert Eggers's Nosferatu is a sumptuous and spine-tingling gothic horror

Now to more serious things – albeit with a light comedic touch – in Jesse Eisenberg’s kind-of road movie, A Real Pain. The actor-filmmaker wrote, directed and stars alongside the marvellous Kieran Culkin, who played spoilt man-child Roman Roy in Succession. Playing chalk-and-cheese Jewish American cousins who were close as children but have drifted apart, the two fortysomethings embark on a trip to Poland to honour their dead grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Eisenberg plays nerdy David, settled into family life in Brooklyn, while Culkin is smart-ass Benji whose life is in turmoil. Despite their contrasting natures, both were close to their grandmother. The two join a disparate group of tourists – ripe for functioning as dramatic devices – on a “Holocaust tour” to the Majdanek death camp.

Beautifully shot, the film follows the tour’s itinerary through Warsaw and Lublin to the concentration camp museum, where the real exploration of pain comes into focus.

Film academic Barry Langford addresses the idea of remembrance culture as the tourists “perform their Jewishness within unstated yet acknowledged limits”. The experience quickly drives home the horrific reality of their grandma’s early life, cracking open one of the cousins and exposing the fragile nature of his own reality. Definitely one to see.

A Real Pain is in cinemas now

Read more: A Real Pain is a subtle but powerful exploration of remembrance culture and personal trauma

A slice of surrealism with a side of Bacon

Commonly associated with melting clocks, lobster telephones and the unhinged down-the-nose stare of Salvador Dali, the art of surrealism has endured in spite of this reductive take. And now, a bold new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield is celebrating a century of great surrealist works.

Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes showcases a diverse range of artists and their individual, often bewildering expressions of the concept. A specialist in the philosophy and history of art, Joanne Crawford explains that as a movement, surrealism has no specific beginning or absolute focus, and that its “roots go deep into the substrata of art, philosophy and science”. Though much of it may feel confounding and contradictory, Crawford’s advice is to lean in and go with the playfulness of this show.

Forbidden Territories: 100 years of Surreal Landscapes is at the Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire until 21 April 2025.

Read more: Forbidden Territories at The Hepworth Wakefield: a bold celebration of surrealism's 100th birthday

And it’s last call for the stunning Francis Bacon: Human Presence exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which comes to an end on January 19. As cultural theorist Rina Arya points out: “In an age of digitally retouched selfies, Bacon’s portraits come as a monumental shock.”

Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of 82, is regarded as redefining the traditional portrait. Marking the painter’s disdain for narrative, his works drop any pretence of conventionally pleasant portraiture for a stark and disturbing exploration of life as a fragile pre-death condition. In his hellish visions of friends and lovers, faces twist half in shadow, features bend in some unknown agony, and eyes are obscured so the gaze focuses on an O-shaped mouth in a howl of rage, misery or pain. Bacon’s extraordinary art may not make the most comfortable viewing, but it is hard to look away.

Francis Bacon: Human Presence is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until January 19 2025.

Read more: Francis Bacon: Human Presence – a compelling look at how the artist redefined portraiture