A young man is delighted to become the sexual plaything of a provocative artist until things take a dark turn.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gregg Araki
Starring: Cooper Hoffman, Olivia Wilde, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho, Roxane Mesquida, Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs
I'm no prude, but I firmly believe sex comedies were a lot funnier when not only could they not portray sex on screen, but their characters couldn't even speak about sex directly. For all its regressive faults, the Hays Code of the 1930s forced screenwriters to be clever, and that decade is now held up as the golden age of comedy. When Hollywood ditched the code, comedies, especially sex comedies, began to go downhill, reaching a nadir in the '80s. With anything goes as far as on screen sex was concerned, screenwriters stopped trying. They knew audiences were no longer watching their movies for the jokes, just for the boobs.
As a director, Olivia Wilde recently revitalised the American sex comedy with The Invite, a sex comedy in which nobody has sex. Wilde's movie is a throwback to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s, and part of what makes it work so well is that the characters spend most of the movie talking around sex rather than directly addressing it. That's not the case with Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex, in which Wilde's character talks about practically nothing but sex. But Araki's film works because it is operating on a postmodern level. Araki is aware of the lameness of late 20th century sex comedies, with their tired gags about goddesses inexplicably throwing themselves at male nebbishes, and he plays into the absurdity of the form. His film, co-written by online "sexpert" Karley Sciortino, is set very much in our present day, but with its generation gap narrative it plays like a modern day twentysomething, with all their sexual hang-ups, has found themselves in an '80s sex comedy.
Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a young man who takes a job as gopher to Erika Tracy (Wilde), a controversial artist known for her provocative work. The allusions to Sunset Boulevard arrive hard and fast with the movie opening with a flash forward to a body floating down in a pool. We then find Elliot being questioned by a pair of cops (Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho) about his relationship with Erika. Elliot relates how a week into his new job he went from schlub to sub when Erika proposed that he become her subordinate not just in the workplace, but in her bedroom. As Erika looks like Olivia Wilde, and he's not getting any action from his uptight girlfriend (a badly miscast Charli XCX, whose talents apparently don't extend to convincing us she isn't horny), Elliot happily agrees. But despite agreeing that their relationship would be purely physical, the poor dolt only goes and makes things messy by falling in love with his domineering mistress.
As a noted provocateur himself, Araki has a lot of fun using Erika as a mouthpiece for an older generation bemused by Gen Z's sex negativity. Erika is described by one character as "if you asked AI to create a bitch," and Wilde leans into her vampy sociopathic nature. But the brilliance of Wilde's performance lies in how she leaves a lot of room for doubt, subtly suggesting that Erika is nowhere near as confident as she portrays herself, certainly not when it comes to her art. This false bravado rubs off on Elliot, who begins to strut around like the cat that got the cream, oblivious to the warnings of Erika's assistant (Daveed Diggs) that "he's not the first and won't be the last." There is a hilariously awkward scene in which Erika coaxes Elliot into seducing one of her friends, a visiting French artist (Roxane Mesquida), only for him to be brought back down to earth in the most humbling of fashion.
When Elliott tries to get Erika to admit she shares his feelings, the furthest she's willing to go is to admit that they have chemistry. That's certainly the case with Wilde and Hoffman, who form an entertaining double act. They're backed by a supporting cast that sees the always reliable Mason Gooding lean into his under-explored comic side as a gay man whose casual attitude to sex contrasts with Elliot's neurosis, and Chase Sui Wonders as Elliot's secretly besotted roommate Apple. In a conventional sex comedy, Elliot and Apple would no doubt end up together, but Araki's film is set in the messiness of the real world, and this subplot leads to one of the film's more uncomfortable sequences when Erika tries to come (quite literally) between the two young friends.
Araki wisely keeps his movie to 90 minutes, knowing that any longer run time is usually the death knell for a comedy. Like The Invite, it moves with the snappy pace of a '30s screwball comedy, with Wilde channelling the vamps and divas that populated such classics. I've never given much thought to Wilde as a star, but with her performances here and in The Invite, playing two characters who couldn't be more different yet are equally amusing, it seems in 2026 she's finally ready for her close-up.
I Want Your Sex is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 28th.
