To Die For: all hail Nicole Kidman, the erotic thriller's secret weapon

The Guardian

28-01-2025

When talking erotic thrillers, Nicole Kidman's name isn't the first name that springs to mind. But more than any other, it is perhaps the genre that has borne Kidman aloft – and, I would argue, to which she's given the most.
It was in Dead Calm, holding her own against a psychotic Billy Zane, that a 30-year-old Kidman caught the eye of Tom Cruise, who ushered her into the Hollywood fold. A decade later, her on-screen pairing with Cruise in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the stuff of fervent anticipation. And now, as a pussy-bowed tech CEO with a submissive kink in Babygirl, Kidman has again bottled some heady bit of the zeitgeist.
Each of these performances is a standout, but only one film – her breakout – showcases the willowy star in full-on femme fatale mode, and that is To Die For. Gus Van Sant's prescient, pitch-black media satire was adapted (by Buck Henry!) from Joyce Maynard's novel of the same name, itself a fictionalised riff on the real-life case of Pamela Smart – who, in 1990, at the tender age of 22, manipulated her teenage lover and a few of his pals into offing her husband.
Kidman stars as Suzanne Maretto, nee Stone, a character who exists on her own, lightly demented plane: equal parts Elle Woods and Patrick Bateman. With her perfectly primped do and array of garish pastel ensembles, Mrs Maretto is the prettiest poison you ever did see, radiating a strawberry blond ambition that's clearly grander than her hum-drum New Hampshire home town, the fictional and trenchantly named Little Hope.
Suzanne's specific ambition is to be on TV. 'You're not anybody in America unless you're on TV,' she says pertly in one of the to-camera monologues that punctuate the film. She has a crisp, singsong lilt that lands somewhere between confidential and condescending, and peppers her speech with references to her heroes – Barbara Walters, Johnny Carson, Connie Chung – albeit she has more to say about whether or not they're 'ethnic' and what they eat for dinner than any of their journalistic coups. Suzanne may have big dreams but she is also bracingly small-minded.
By her own, cathode ray-fried logic, her husband is a nobody: Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) works at the Italian joint his parents own, and would rather his wife focused on starting a family than becoming a media megastar. (His enthusiasm about her weather girl gig at the two-bit local TV station is quick to wane.) For Suzanne, that's reason enough to have Larry killed – though she tells James, the lunkheaded teen punk she's pegged to do the deed (Joaquin Phoenix), that it's because he beats her.
Poor James. He's one of the misfit trio Suzanne's been filming for what she envisions as a hard-hitting documentary – one of our enterprising antiheroine's many initiatives – and he's already enamoured. No one but Suzanne has ever given him such solicitous attention, especially not anyone so 'clean'. Once she starts the slow drip of sexual encounters, he's putty in her manicured hands.
'A guy that does that to someone like you doesn't deserve to live,' James sputters during one of their trysts. 'I suppose you're right,' replies Suzanne, gazing pointedly at him with glassy, unblinking eyes. Then: 'Oh, fuck, I love this song!' She squeals and turns the radio up, flooding the parked car with the opening riff of Sweet Home Alabama. Suddenly she's out of the vehicle and twirling girlishly, a nymphette in the headlights. More than the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Suzanne is moved by the apparent success of her little sob story, not to mention the presence of an appreciative audience: through the windshield, James looks on, befuddled and utterly bewitched.
It's one of the film's laugh-out-loud moments: Kidman's tonal pivot is so quick, so bizarre, as to dizzy the viewer along with her dim-witted mark.
Like Eyes Wide Shut, like Babygirl, To Die For is not a straight-up erotic thriller but one with a twist; it's bitterly comic where others are sexily cruel. Kidman was not first choice for Suzanne – that was Meg Ryan, who turned it down for fear of damaging her girl-next-door image – but she pursued it with a fitting pertinacity. Kidman's efforts (unlike Suzanne's) paid off, yielding a deliciously monstrous confection – and if this character is lesser known than others in the femme fatale pantheon, it's because she's naff rather than chic; naive rather than urbane. Like the film itself, Suzanne goes against type – and so, time and again, has Kidman.
To Die For is available to stream on SBS On Demand in Australia, ITVX in the UK, and Criterion in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here