I WANT YOUR SEX Review

The year is 2026 and a 66 year old man has crawled out of a twelve year retirement to make a film begging young people to take their clothes off and be honest with each other. This is where we are. This is I Want Your Sex. Gregg Araki looked at the cultural moment, at the right wing influencers proudly announcing their celibacy like it is a personality trait, at an entire generation too anxious and too online to admit they want anything, and decided that someone needed to say something. Nobody else was going to do it. Fine. He will do it.

Olivia Wilde plays Erika, a Los Angeles artist whose work is aggressively terrible and wildly lucrative and who uses her gallery as a personal hunting ground for young male assistants she can dominate in latex power suits. She describes herself as a pretentious whore from hell with the calm confidence of someone who has spent years arriving at that description and is very pleased with it. Wilde is having the time of her life and it radiates off the screen like heat.

Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, her newest hire, a people pleaser so constitutionally incapable of knowing what he wants that he will apparently agree to almost anything rather than have a preference. Hoffman plays him with this scruffy, baffled, golden retriever energy that is exactly right. He is not an idiot. He is just a person who has never once stopped to ask himself what he actually desires, which in Araki's worldview is a far more dangerous condition.

The real performance of the film belongs to Chase Sui Wonders as Apple, Elliot's roommate, a pent up tomboy who is not entirely sure what she wants and gets one scene with Erika that is simultaneously the funniest and most genuinely moving thing in the entire movie. More Apple. Always more Apple.

The film is messier than it should be. The murder mystery framing device never earns its place. Several tremendous actors, Daveed Diggs, Roxane Mesquida, are stuffed into roles with no room to breathe. The visual style is flatter than Araki's best work, the one liners occasionally land with a thud, and the whole thing is considerably tamer than its title would have you believe. These are real problems.

But there is a Radio Dept needle drop in here so perfectly placed it made me want to applaud in an empty room. There is genuine warmth underneath all the provocation. And the central argument, that vulnerability is terrifying but going through life without knowing who you are or what you want is considerably more terrifying, lands with more conviction than the execution always deserves.

Not everything gets off. But the parts that do are worth the trip.

🍿 SCORE = 70/100