Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Daveed Diggs, Charli XCX, Margaret Cho, Roxane Mesquida
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance, Thriller
Director: Gregg Araki
In Irish Cinemas: 28th August 2026
The familiar narrative about Gen Z is that intimacy has taken a back seat, replaced by friendship, emotional caution, and plenty of criticism aimed at older generations. Gregg Araki’s latest film arrives almost as a counterargument. For a filmmaker so closely associated with Gen X rebellion and the New Queer Cinema movement, I Want Your Sex looks back to an era when sexual desire was treated as unruly, exciting, identity-shaping, and worth exploring.
The film follows Elliot, a young man who has plenty of sexual curiosity but remarkably little understanding of what he actually wants. His uncertainty becomes the perfect opening for Erika, a provocative performance artist and gallery owner who takes an unusual interest in him. She effectively turns Elliot into an experiment, introducing him to a world of fantasies, fetishes, and increasingly blurred boundaries. What emerges is a deliberately outrageous version of a coming-of-age story: part sexual initiation, part identity crisis, and part twisted Pygmalion.
Araki also frames the movie as a glossy parody of classic Hollywood stories about ambition, corruption, and doomed glamour. The opening image of a body floating in a swimming pool immediately suggests Sunset Boulevard, before the narrative rewinds to explain how everything reached that point. Elliot has just secured a coveted job at a fashionable Los Angeles art gallery, where his duties initially seem mundane. A bizarre encounter with his superiors soon changes that. Instead of being dismissed, he receives an unexpected promotion into Erika’s orbit.
Olivia Wilde plays Erika as an unapologetically theatrical force of nature. The character recalls the larger-than-life sexual provocateurs of earlier pop culture, particularly the era when celebrity, performance art, and erotic self-expression frequently collided. Erika treats Elliot’s inhibitions as obstacles to be demolished. Yet beneath the outrageous behavior is a flicker of affection and vulnerability, giving the character more dimension than the deliberately exaggerated surface initially suggests.
Subtlety has never been central to Araki’s filmmaking, and I Want Your Sex certainly does not suddenly embrace restraint. The provocative title accurately signals the movie’s approach: loud, colorful, irreverent, and intentionally confrontational. Even decades removed from the period when Araki established himself as a cinematic provocateur, the filmmaker retains the same fascination with alienated young people, sexual freedom, outsider culture, and the collision between desire and identity.
The supporting cast provides some of the film’s strangest and most memorable detours. Charli XCX appears in an especially deadpan comic moment, while Chase Sui Wonders brings an unexpectedly tragic quality to an attempted three-person encounter. Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho appear in the increasingly noirish sections of the story, helping push the film toward its deliberately absurd mystery surrounding the body introduced at the beginning.
Those diversions are also where the movie occasionally loses its footing. The central relationship between Elliot and Erika is considerably more compelling than the surrounding thriller mechanics. At its best, the film understands that sexual experimentation is not simply about spectacle; it can become a route toward discovering identity, vulnerability, attraction, and eventually the kind of connection a person actually wants.
That tension gives I Want Your Sex its most interesting idea. The film may appear to be arguing for a return to old-fashioned sexual liberation, but its strongest moments suggest something more complicated. Desire can be thrilling, disruptive, ridiculous, and transformative, yet experimentation does not necessarily provide the emotional destination. Elliot’s eventual growth comes from recognizing what the relationship with Erika means rather than endlessly pursuing novelty.
For all its provocation, the film ultimately lands somewhere surprisingly sentimental. Beneath the fetish gear, neon colors, outrageous performances, and noir theatrics is a story about two people whose connection cannot remain frozen in its original form. Araki may be nostalgic for an era when sexual freedom felt rebellious, but the movie’s deepest insight is much simpler: experimentation can reveal what someone wants, but genuine connection is what gives that discovery meaning.
Overall: 5.5/10
Movie Reviewer
