I Want Your Sex
Olivia Wilde has a heyday as a sexual predator in Gregg Araki’s provocative, impudent and entertaining sex comedy.
Wild about Olivia: Olivia Wilde taunts Cooper Hoffman
Photo courtesy of Black Bear Pictures.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The title is a little ambiguous but it points the viewer in the right direction. As the horror genre has been pushing boundaries like never before, the sex comedy seems to have taken a step backwards. In the modern age there are so many new boundaries and defining parameters, so much wokery, that screen characters seem reluctant to have fun in the bedroom anymore, or anywhere else. Streaming platforms seem to have taken up the slack (think Sex Education), but mainstream fare from the studios couldn’t say boo to a goose. “Wuthering Heights” was raunchy but not exactly revolutionary – and all strictly above the waist. Welcome, then, to I Want Your Sex, from the difficult, challenging and often abstruse indie wunderkind Gregg Araki, whose titles include Totally F***ed Up (1993) and Kaboom (2010). Araki usually writes his own material, but here he has teamed up with Karley Sciortino, she who founded the sexually orientated website Slutever. The result is arguably Araki’s most accessible film to date, albeit predictably outrageous and confrontational. We are moving into territory previously inhabited by the likes of 9½ Weeks (1986) and Secretary (2002), but that was all so long ago. In the meantime, where has all the coitus gone?
Things began to change just two months ago with The Invite, where grown-ups talked about stuff that teenagers can but dream of. One of the year’s smartest, surprising and funniest multiplex releases, The Invite was directed by and starred Olivia Wilde who has suddenly come out of hiding, after a relatively unremarkable career in front of the camera. In I Want Your Sex she plays the polar opposite of the mousy, housebound Angela in The Invite, and she is a riot. The movie opens with a scantily-clad Cooper Hoffman stumbling into an apartment with blood pouring from his mouth while uttering a stream of f-bombs (beating Hugh Grant’s previous record in Four Weddings and a Funeral). Something has obviously gone terribly wrong and Hoffman’s Elliot Bell relates the events of the last few days in a police cell to a pair of incredulous detectives (Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho). We cut back nine-and-a-half-weeks (obviously), when Elliot announces to camera that, “I am a slave to this vagina.” He has been working at an art studio for one week, his first job out of college and has nabbed the gig over a bunch of more qualified applicants. It seems that his mistress – sorry, boss – has taken a liking to this gauche, inexperienced 23-years-old Everyman. Elliot has a girlfriend (Charli XCX), but she seems more interested in her studies than spending quality time with him, arguing that, “we just had sex eleven days ago.” But Erika Tracy (Wilde) is all about sex: she exudes it, sells it and has made a very pretty penny from it, as her art work pushes the boundaries of good taste. She asks Elliot to help carry a new canvas into her home, explaining, “I would have done it myself, but I don’t do manual labour.” Once she has Eliot in her sights, she sees how far she can push the guy, coaxing him into ever more impossibly outlandish scenarios for some perverse sexual thrill of her own, while stating, “I would never say anything that would be inappropriate.”
Olivia Wilde is having enormous fun here, establishing a sexual villain several scratch marks above Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct (1992). She is eloquent, sexy and irresistible, shuffling her endorphins with dollar signs. As her willing victim, Hoffman brings an endearing ordinariness to a decent man out of his depth, while Araki has secured good performances from a strong supporting cast: Chase Sui Wonders as Elliot’s loyal best friend Apple, Daveed Diggs as Erika’s exasperated business manager and Charli XCX.
Some of I Want Your Sex may be a little OTT for some tastes, but the lines are witty and the material provocative as well as entertaining, resulting in a cocktail you wouldn’t want to share with your grandmother. It’s been a red-letter year for Olivia Wilde and when Yvette, Erika’s “friend from Europe” (Roxane Mesquida), explains to Elliot that “sex is not something you do – it is a language, it is a dance,” we cannot but feel the echo of Penélope Cruz from The Invite, who was certainly on the same wavelength (those Europeans…) – and had much to teach Olivia Wilde’s eager Angela. Ms Wilde has obviously taken it to heart.
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho, Roxane Mesquida, Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Darcy Marta, James Duval.
Dir Gregg Araki, Pro Gregg Araki, Seth Caplan, Teddy Schwarzman, Michael Heimler, Courtney L. Cunniff and Karley Sciortino, Screenplay Karley Sciortino and Gregg Araki, Ph Tucker Korte, Pro Des Angelique Clark, Ed Gregg Araki and Victor de la Parra, Music James Clements, Costumes Arianne Phillips.
Black Bear Pictures-Black Bear Pictures.
90 mins. USA. 2026. US Rel: 31 July 2026. UK Rel: 28 August 2026. Cert. 18.
