Wanting as an Act: Female Desire in “Nosferatu” and “Babygirl”
Who are women, when no one’s watching? In an empty, candlelit room with no one there to reprimand us for wanting? I found myself asking these questions after watching Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Halina Reijn’s Babygirl in the same week. These two widely acclaimed films are both about female sexuality, and though they are so different on the surface–one’s a haunting vampire movie, one’s a sleek workplace film–their core messages are strikingly similar.
Both Eggers and Reijn invite us to witness a raw meditation on sexual repression, and how it wreaks havoc on a woman’s life and psyche. While sexual pleasure in Judaism and in the Western world is far from technically forbidden—the Torah and Talmud have long encouraged both the giving and receiving of it—female desire remains taboo in many societies, including Jewish ones.
Both films raise the idea that desire is like hunger or an itch that can only be denied for so long. They suggest that the repercussions of abstinence, imposed by society and self, are explosive and destructive. So much of a woman’s life, after all, is about control, and perhaps that’s why seeing both films’ female protagonists “risk it all” for momentary pleasure, including sabotaging the lives of those they love and cherish, is a cathartic trainwreck we can’t look away from.
Babygirl’s Romy (Nicole Kidman) jeopardizes her family and decades of professional success for what seems like a momentary affair with a young intern, but we understand that her wanting is not a matter of choice or a deliberate means to an end. Instead, she’s been repressing part of herself—the part that craves slightly off-color sexual submission–for so long, it’s clamoring to come out. Hers may be a gentle, almost comical, kink, but her desire for it is anything but gentle.
Secretly, we wonder what would happen if we followed suit and listened to our own deeper appetites.
In Nosferatu, Eggers’ 2024 remake of Murnau’s 1922 film, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is long haunted by Count Orlok in her dreams—a bloodthirsty vampire, an ancient curse that threatens destruction and death unless she submits to him. Ellen knows the only way to break the curse is to “rekindle” their connection—but first she must face the deep shame of her past with him and take ownership of her fateful desire. Unlike the passive protagonist of the original, Eggers’ Ellen is not merely an object of Nosferatu’s obsession—this time, the choice to say yes is hers.
What if like Ellen, we succumbed to the voice calling for us in the night? What if we put our good-girl bravado to rest? Through both Romy and Ellen, female viewers may get familiar with our own darkness and whether we’re in touch with the Lilith within us or not, this is where curiosity punctures us all the same. Lilith is traditionally Adam’s first wife who refused to submit to him – the insistence on her autonomy led to her forever demonization and exclusion. I would argue that both characters get a chance to listen to their inner Lilith.
There’s a fundamental difference between active desire and passive desire; the paradox that a woman who wants is not the same woman who’s wanted. Under the patriarchy, the perfect woman is strategic in her seduction and generously receptive to whatever comes her way and sweeps her off her feet. If she dares to let the vulgarity of her own active wanting take over, she becomes less desirable, her attitude less commendable—because doing so means no room for power imbalance. The liberation of various waves of feminism, I’d argue, has won us some degree of acceptance for the idea of consent. It’s won us safer conditions to be wanted in, and that is not the same thing as letting us want, which is what both these films explore. This is exactly why Kidman’s Romy, while being an incredibly successful CEO, must still navigate the unspoken rules of a male-dominated industry, her attitude scrutinized through the lens of her femininity first, professionalism second. In contrast, Ellen exercises full agency in choosing to submit to Count Orlok—an act that directly opposes the passive, sacrificial role of the ‘vampire’s victim’ archetype, in which desire is imposed upon a woman rather than something she claims for herself.
Is this prohibition of desire self-inflicted? Partially. That’s how oppression, and repression, work.
In Nosferatu, Ellen is haunted by the vampire’s voice taking root in her inner monologue—a metaphorical male observer pestering her ordinary life. Babygirl’s Romy lives by the female CEO persona —always eloquent, tame and well-spoken, male-approved, maintaining a flawless exterior through Botox and silk skirts, only letting her true animalistic self surface when no one’s around. For women raised in religious communities, this awareness of being perceived extends beyond social expectations—it is, first and foremost, spiritual. The ‘observer’ in a woman’s mind is not merely external judgment but a misinterpretation of yetzer hatov (“the good inclination”) as total denial of everything deemed as impure, often manifesting as an internal male gaze. Reijn, the director of Babygirl, explains: “When we look in the mirror, we look at ourselves through the blueprint, which is a straight white male, and we forget ourselves. But how would I look at myself if all of that would be gone? What would I wear? How would I behave?”.
So much of a woman’s journey is about rigorous discipline: controlling food intake, controlling her emotions, practicing tzniut (modesty/humility in Jewish tradition), regulating and concealing, constantly temperature-checking her surroundings. But when your desire disrupts the norms of your existence—like the beastly appetite you develop once you’ve gone too long without a meal—it becomes incompatible with incessant discipline and demands immediate and primal surrender.
I think there’s a fear living in many women’s heads of what might possibly happen if she lets herself desire. Both films culminate in their heroines attending to their inner Liliths, however disastrous the consequences (relatively mild in Babygirl, while in Nosferatu, female desire saves the day, though at a great cost!). While Jewish tradition does not inherently prohibit female desire, generations of social conditioning, religious or otherwise, have trained us to police ourselves. Perhaps it all starts with acknowledging the shame around desire: we can’t enjoy sexuality until we respect what our bodies need, and to do so, we must first become aware of our incessant discipline and how it denies our wanting.
Desire is not a dangerous matter. When stripped bare, it reveals a pure and divine nature. Feminists have long argued that desire is a pathway to unlocking our power: Audre Lorde writes “the erotic is the nurturer of all our deepest knowledge,” in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”
Put in other words, to want is also to know. Desire, tender and holy, is an invitation to get closer to our most authentic self. It’s through the exploration of desire that our connection to the divine is reinvented. By wanting, we can mirror the divine within us, the essence of all creation and the very force that brought us into the world.
Valerie Estrina is an Amsterdam-based writer and marketer, author of a weekly cultural newsletter Club Reticent.
