Elliot lands a job for Erika Tracy as her sexual muse.
‘I Want Your Sex’ is the latest film from Gregg Araki, and as the title perhaps suggests, sex plays a large part in proceedings. It begins with a homage to ‘Sunset Boulevard’ as a body floats in a swimming pool, before jumping back nine and a half weeks (another little joke) to find Elliott (Cooper Hoffman) preparing for an interview at the studio of renowned artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). Erika is an avant-garde artist famed for her sexually explicit work, and Elliott soon discovers that the boundaries between her art, professional life and sexual relationships are deliberately difficult to define.
Araki uses their relationship to satirise the modern art world while playing around with ideas of consent, #MeToo and workplace sexual dynamics, wrapping it all up in a deliberately provocative sex comedy. There’s an artificiality to almost everything, from the characters and dialogue to the heightened world they inhabit, and while much of that is clearly by design, it didn’t particularly work for me. I found the dialogue stilted rather than funny, and increasingly struggled to buy into Elliott and Erika’s relationship or some of the directions the plot takes as things become more complicated.
The performances are probably the strongest element. Hoffman is well cast as someone completely out of his depth in Erika’s world, while Wilde throws herself into a character who needs to be charismatic, intimidating and frequently ridiculous. She’s very good, and following ‘The Invite’ it’s been a particularly strong year for her as an actress.
Despite the performances being good throughout, I didn’t particularly like ‘I Want Your Sex’ as a whole. There are some interesting ideas around sex, power and workplace relationships, but I don’t think Araki is really interested in critiquing them fully and to be honest, I thought the film was pretty cheesy and naff overall. A disappointment!
Rating: 2/5
Directed By: Gregg Araki
Starring: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho, Roxane Mesquida, Charli XCX and Daveed Diggs
'One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.' The Invite (2026) 