I WANT YOUR SEX
2026
Directed by Gregg Araki
Written by Karley Sciortino and Gregg Araki
Maybe it would have happened more gradually for someone who hadn't just caught up with the last of his so-called "Teenage Apocalypse" trilogy the night before they saw his new movie, and hadn't seen any of the (comparatively few) features he'd made in between, but somewhere inside there Gregg Araki, one of the more important voices in the "Gen X" genre of 1990s indie filmmaking and probably the guy for edgy queer indie filmmaking in the 1990s, became an old man. And that's pretty much an denotated fact—for all I know, he receives Social Security checks—but I also mean it in the connotative sense, though I don't mean it in the pejorative one, just that I Want Your Sex is mostly about yelling at the neurotic-verging-on-psychotic virgins who seem to make up a disproportionate share of a broadly-defined Generation Z while very grudgingly conceding that they might be right, but still wanting to make the point that they're doing it wrong and they somehow seem to have more anxieties about sex than he did as a kid when sex, or the kind of sex he'd have liked to have been having, stood a chance of literally killing him.
It's funny yelling, though I'm also probably a mark for that sort of thing, and while I think it's possible to conjure it as an invisible structural joke or deliberate satire, it arrives by way of a gender-swapped Secretary, in a way that is not overly dedicated to pointing out, on its own, that it's a gender-swapped Secretary (with a more robust sense of humor, mind you), or that a gender-swapped Secretary is by far the likeliest way that this story could make its way to market here in 2026; I don't know how much the latter movie actually takes place in an art gallery—the other thing this movie's about, incidentally, is its correctly nihilistic view of contemporary art—but I do think it's a bit of a blind that a chronology-setting title card lets us know the main trunk of the movie takes place "9 1/2 Weeks earlier." Well, when we start out nine and a half weeks later, we find young Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) in women's underwear in what we intuit is someone else's swanky pad, discovering a nude body floating dead in the swimming pool in film-referential manner. This corpse belongs to one Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), celebrated artist of sexuality, both Elliot's employer and, as the interrogating cops (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, alright) soon unveil, his lover and hard domme. On that hangs his tale: of how Elliot, recent college grad and longer-term loser, applied for the position of, ahem, assistant at Erika's gallery, succumbed fairly rapidly to his boss's aggressive sexual harassment despite having a girlfriend (Charlotte "XCX" Aitchison), and subsequently got in over his head as his emotional attachment far outran his mistress's.
So: I am confident that at some point Gregg Araki has made what you would term a "real movie"—I suspect Mysterious Skin could be such a thing—but I have no evidence he made one in the 20th century and I Want Your Sex is only better at disguising itself as one than, e.g., the avowed disjointedness of Nowhere. That might be the contribution of his co-writer Karley Sciortino, a lady Dan Savage or Cenobite memoirist, or something along those lines, who was also Araki's collaborator on their short-lived show Now Apocalypse, but she's likely as not here to try to infuse some fresh perspective into the old man's shouts of "o tempora, o mores," though as a fellow Elder Millennial I'm not convinced we do have our finger on the pulse of our bloodless juniors. Anyway, I don't necessarily mean it as an outright slam, and it's certainly not a dismissal: I have enjoyed every last Araki movie I've ever seen, and they all have, if not precisely "something to say," then in quintessentially Gen X fashion they have a clear point-of-view from which to not say it, and they're thrilling exercises in what we might today describe as vibes-based cinema. I'm not sure placing that inside something designed to look like a plot is very helpful, though (the most annoying aspects of The Doom Generation, my favorite of the Arakis I've seen, is when it feints at "plot"), and I suppose this is all just to get it out there that the reverse Sunset Boulevard I've described adds up to virtually nothing, and positively nothing that couldn't have been achieved in chronological order except, I guess, that "9 1/2 weeks" card.
Instead, then, it's a series of scenes, most of them similar to previous scenes, that runs for 90 minutes and in lieu of "plot" bears a certain sense of escalation that does more-or-less cohere the movie into a narrative object. I'm fairly sure those scenes don't operate on any strict schedule, but it wouldn't be unfair to say the movie takes turns with them: Erika makes outre social commentary while Elliot beams at his star crush and, if called upon to respond, anxiously stammers; Elliot's coworker Zap (Mason Gooding) stands in detached gay watchfulness making wry gay pronouncements, free of the psychosexual torment of the heterosexual (my understanding is that unlike Zap whose first lines of dialogue dispense with the 21st century microidentitarian impulse,* Araki doesn't adore being labelled, but has been operationally bisexual—in a way that shines through in his movies—while obviously preferring gayness as a cultural mode); Elliot suffers under his absolute gorgon of a med student girlfriend that he is, as I believe Araki would venture and I think it'd be hard to passionately dispute him, justifiably cheating on; Elliot commiserates with his bottled-up best friend/roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), who is somewhat clearly in love with Elliot and who feels like the movie forgot, or at least forgot to have a proper last scene with her, in her way more of a representation of the film's basic unstructuredness than the go-nowhere cop scenes are; and, finally, the centerpieces, the zanily-heightened BDSM sex modules between Erika and Elliot, roughly half-and-half split between real and dream.
And, all told, I think this does go somewhere, as a study of Elliot as a type and to some essential degree Erika as well, though, oddly, she might be less-typed, or at least offered more nuance than a movie that's decided to name one of its tertiary characters "Margaret Epstein" (Darcy Marta, who hasn't been in any movie since The Living End), apropos of absolutely nothing besides giving you a reason to take a bite out of your own cheek. But let's hang back on the setpieces and the general affect, visual and otherwise, of I Want Your Sex for a bit. It's kind of a shame that, being so reminiscent of his 90s work, the 21st century probably demanded a far greater sense of solidity to Araki's aesthetic than what he was able to get up to on movies that cost the change that he could scrounge out of couch cushions and sewer grates, so it's a persuasive art gallery and persuasive mansion and persuasive shit apartment rather than the dreamlike kitsch surrealism of sets that probably better earn the right to be called "art" than anything Erika's produced, as she'd probably agree (her work is split between pretentious porn and sculptural or textural representations of genitalia, and while it's a blatant reach I could suggest that one current in Wilde's performance is the resentment of a creator who's sure she would've come up with square-shocking provocations in the 70s if she'd had the opportunity, but is bitterly aware that her art and possibly all art has reached a horizon of banality**). But with that aside, it's a poppy and colorful movie, boasting some wacked-out costumes even before we get into the "BDSM means overdressed for the activity, right?" sex stuff, especially in the fantasy sequences that can take place in less thoroughly-defined spaces with more unmotivated lighting ideas.
I also said it's a funny movie and I don't want to bury that, but neither just list jokes, possibly a majority of which, anyway, are just Wilde snapping violently into another "kids these days just need a good sodomization, and they're afraid to ask for it" line that, through some alchemy of delivery and timing, do manage to be funny though they're more edgelording than actual "jokes" and I expect one's mileage may vary on how amusing they are; but Araki has always been capable of braiding sincere obsession with the way sex rules people's lives with a mocking, even slapstick sarcasm about sexual desire and sexual acts arising naturally from his movies' cartoonish unreality, and he hasn't stopped being good at that here. So I'll just mention the movie's most unexpected and perhaps therefore funniest joke qua joke, on the subject of Elliot's stymied desire for his girlfriend (she's named Minerva; so why doesn't everyone have a metaphorical name?), which indeed turns I Want Your Sex into a literal cartoon for a few seconds. But the BDSM sequences, I expect, took pride of place for everyone involved, and while I ribbed the movie earlier in this respect, it manages the trick of not replacing actual screen sexuality with BDSM, which I promise frequently does in fact involve nudity, genitals, and penetration; as a theatrically-released narrative film, we're mainly going to be grading it on the first of those, and it passes, to a degree surprising in 2026, and as to whether it's sexy... well, not inconsiderably! (Not even one single "mommy!" though, so room for improvement.) Though I have an inkling it's purposeful that the fantasy sequences in Elliot's head are sexier than the more awkward reality, but ain't that always the way.
The actors are game: Hoffman's wisely not even attempting to contest nearly any scene with Wilde (I guess I don't want to spoil anything, but, eventually, his sub does, in an editing lacuna that goes wholly without any later explanation and I think might be a key to unlocking... something about the movie). And Wilde is, of course, awfully good at the basic requirement of an appealingly imperious sexuality—somebody, if just the stylist, is clearly leaning all the way in to her resemblance to Ivy Wolfe***—prompting a fair amount of whiplash if the literal last movie you saw in a theater was her directorial effort, The Invite, the movie about a partner-swapping party that its neurotic participants drive off a cliff before anyone ever takes the majority of their clothes off. (Though I'm going to grouse about a script that Araki and Sciortino blatantly forgot to retouch after Wilde joined the project. "Are those even real?" a character asks of Erika's breasts, and I'm going to put my chips on "yeah." Araki's (and/or Victor de la Parra's) editing during the first scene with pronounced undress raises the dreaded specter of the ass double—I don't know why I'm insistent on Araki taking this structural film dork approach to his movie about fucking, and making fun of how and why people want to fuck—but, for the record, that specter is exorcized.) Wilde, anyway, is apparently relishing this chance to play the over-the-top supervillain version of the opposite of everything she believes in and the person she professes to be, and if there's something cutting to the heart of BDSM here, maybe that's it.
In a fashion that I guess I'd describe as "classical Araki," then, it is after something big, though it might not know what that is or what it'd do with it if it caught it; it catches hold of easier-to-grasp things, like the inability to articulate desire, especially before a partner that makes you feel real shame (rather than, you know, the fun kind), and the realization that Elliot has that he was effectively already a 24/7 submissive under Minerva because he hasn't been able to firewall his sexual temperament from his personality as a human being is maybe the movie's actual best joke, while later it brings in a Euroringer (Roxane Mesquida) to usefully parody the distinction people make between "eroticism," whatever the fuck that is, and "sexuality," albeit also at poor Elliot's expense, because all things here are at poor Elliot's expense. It does, I think, want you to notice the glimmers of personhood that Wilde is shining through her sociopath's cracks, and not be positively sure those are just in Elliot's head (if I describe Erika as more "nuanced" than the actual protagonist, it's probably as much down to Wilde being by far the movie's best actor), but mainly it wants to try thinking through ideas of consent and power disparity in the context of an experience where being compelled is the exciting thing, and you don't have any good Goddamn idea what you want anyway—if there's one thing I'm sure Araki has 100% deliberately intellectualized, it's sure as fuck got to be the Night of the Hunter tattoos on Elliot's hands which read "yes?" and "no?" respectively, and that tends to maintain as the movie spools out (ultimately across years)—and the movie feels unsafe enough to give you something to think about as well as feel. It's a better late style movie than some of what we've been getting lately, because "old man" or not it's just Araki's style, and it is kind of remarkable to jump straight from 1997 to 2026 with a filmmaker and perceive pretty much the same dude, still trying to take a swing at the fog of "how to be happy."
Score: 7/10
*And, befitting an old man's movie, I Want Your Sex is potentially a few years out-of-date in some respects, as I've gotten the impression the microidentitarian impulse is functionally dead.
**Though it's probably not as funny at this as Velvet Buzzsaw or, even where it was a smaller part of the movie, Sorry To Bother You.
**Who mostly played submissive roles in my experience, but obviously had the physicality to switch.
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