David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear July 30, 2026
Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in 'I Want Your Sex.' Magnolia Pictures The current party line around Gen Z is that they have ditched sex en masse in favor of more platonic relationships, thus leaving them more time and energy to lecture their elders about how we’ve monumentally fucked everything up. (Tough, but fair.) Gregg Araki — filmmaker, New Queer Cinema icon, staunch Generation X representative — would like to remind them that once upon a time, sex was cool. Sex was edgy. Sex was natural, sex was fun, sex was best when it was one on one.
The fact that I Want Your Sex — not a biopic of George Michael, but if anyone was going to make a dramatization of the singer’s life and times, we’d want Araki to be the one doing it — features one of the single most sorrowful threesomes to ever grace the screen certainly makes a case for that last part. Mostly, however, the writer-director wants to revisit the so-very-20th-century notion that sex was a way of both defining and giving into your desire, as much a part of personal identity as fashion and pop cultural tastes. His hero, a twentysomething named Elliot, has libido to burn, but no sense of what really gets him going or why such things matter. When a performance artist with an endless amount of fetish gear decides to turn the young horndog into a personal project, the scene is set for a sample platter of deviancy in the name of discovery. The movie is essentially an old-fashioned story of one lad’s sentimental education, spiced up with NSFW perversity. It’s Pygmalion with pegging.
I Want Your Sex is also, as it announces in its cryptic prologue, a send-up of Faustian showbiz noirs like Sunset Boulevard, another story of a campy diva and a pilgrim’s progress in the city of angels. This time, the diva is face down in her pool, and the pilgrim is in skimpy lingerie. Cut to “9 1/2 weeks ago” [yuk yuk yuk]. We meet Elliot, played with winning charm and a great resting-confusion face by Cooper Hoffman, right after he’s landed a plum gig at a hip Los Angeles gallery. He and his fellow art-world grunt, Zap (Mason Gooding), stick chewed bubble-gum onto a painting of a vagina. A hovering middle manager (Daveed Diggs) informs Elliot that he’s being summoned to the boss’s office. The poor kid thinks he’s about to get fired. What’s in store for him is far worse. It’s a promotion — not a vertical one so much as an extremely horizontal one.
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Because the woman running the place is named Erika, and this performance artist-cum-hotspot owner has decided, for reasons that are never fully articulated (maybe she finds his ability to be easily corrupted a turn-on; maybe she’s just bored), to make him her regular situationship-with-benefits. She’s played by Olivia Wilde, and along with her role in The Invite, her performance as the dom in this sub-dom rom-com officially makes this a Wilde Hot American Summer. It’s the flip-side of the frustrated wife she portrays in that aforementioned hit she also directed, though her cartoonish vamp oddly pairs nicely with the other, far more repressed role. Based loosely on Truth or Dare-era Madonna — you could see Erika putting out several volumes’ worth of Sex books — she is all raging id, mentoring Elliot in the ways of obliterating hang-ups and boundaries in the name of liberation. There’s also hints of vulnerability and genuine tenderness in her Iron Lady of the bedroom, which Wilde slips in just slyly enough to let the presence of a heart peek through all the brainy brashness and hormone overload. She’s clearly on a roll.
