There’s a moment in nearly every Gregg Araki film where the candy-colored nihilism cracks open just enough to reveal something tender, something terrifying, or both at once. With I Want Your Sex, the indie provocateur isn’t just cracking that shell - he’s stomping it into glittering dust. The film, which hit theaters on July 29 after a festival run that left audiences delightfully squirming, arrives this awards-adjacent season as the rare pure comedy that refuses to stay pure. Or particularly comedic. Or particularly anything, really, other than entirely, dangerously Araki.
The setup is deceptively simple. Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman, trading his Licorice Pizza earnestness for a wider-eyed, sweeter gullibility) lands a plum gig as an assistant to Erika Tracy, the legendary artist, icon and all-around provocateur played with a razor-sharp, purring menace by Olivia Wilde. Erika is a force of nature - think Carolee Schneemann crossed with a tech-bro CEO and a dominatrix who read too much Bataille. She doesn’t just make art; she orchestrates it. And her latest piece? It requires a muse. A sexual muse. And Elliot, fresh-faced and flattered, volunteers his body and soul without reading the fine print.
What follows is less a seduction and more a descent. Araki, working from his own script, doesn’t bother with the slow burn. Within the first twenty minutes, Elliot is already in over his head - literally and figuratively - as Erika introduces him to a world where the line between performance and reality is not just blurred but pulverized. “You think you’re here for a job,” Wilde’s Erika coos at one point, her voice dropping to a whisper that lands like a slap, “but you’re here for a transformation.” And transformation, in Araki-land, always comes with a body count.
The sprawling, unexpectedly game cast helps anchor the chaos. Mason Gooding brings a slick, jock-ish menace to Zap, Erika’s ex-protégé who views Elliot as a disposable replacement. Chase Sui Wonders plays Apple with a woozy, dangerous innocence, and Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho show up as Detectives Zem and Zola, a deadpan Laurel and Hardy duo investigating the strangeness that ensues. But the film’s secret weapon is Roxane Mesquida as Yvette, a French gallery owner who delivers exposition with the icy finality of a guillotine drop, and Charli xcx, whose cameo as the androgynous, mostly silent Minerva feels less like stunt casting and more like a fractal of the film’s central thesis: in Erika’s orbit, everyone is an object, a creator, or a corpse.
At 90 minutes, I Want Your Sex is a trim, mean little bullet. Araki doesn't waste a frame. He’s back to his Mysterious Skin level of tonal tightrope walking, but with the volume cranked to eleven. The director, who essentially defined the 90s queer New Queer Cinema movement with films like The Doom Generation and Nowhere, has always understood that comedy and horror are opposite sides of the same sticky coin. Here, he flips that coin into a slot machine that pays out in nervous laughter followed by queasy silences.
The reviews have been predictably split down the middle - a TMDb score of 6.2 and an IMDb rating of 6.4 suggest a film that people either adore for its audacity or resist for its deliberate abrasiveness. But no one can accuse it of being safe. The performances, particularly from Hoffman, who has to sell an arc from horny naif to traumatized initiate, are fearless. Wilde, in particular, gives the best performance of her career. She understands that Erika isn’t a villain; she’s a mirror, reflecting every repressed desire and predatory instinct Elliot brings into her studio.
The film’s final act, which spirals into a genuinely unhinged tableau of betrayal and murder, feels earned precisely because Araki spent the previous hour making us laugh at the absurdity of it all. He’s not making fun of sex or obsession. He’s making fun of our inability to see them as the same thing. When the credits rolled at my screening, a woman behind me whispered, “I don’t know if I liked that.” Her companion replied, “I don’t think that’s the point.”
That’s the point. I Want Your Sex isn’t designed to be liked. It’s designed to be survived. And in an era of franchise fatigue and algorithmic safety, there’s something perversely thrilling about a studio-backed film that wants to chew you up, spit you out, and ask if you had a good time doing it. The answer, for this critic, is a bewildered, sticky, enthusiastic yes.
