Movie review by Greg Carlson
Gregg Araki, New Queer Cinema legend and provocateur, now 66, brings some laughter and some pain to the kids who weren’t yet born when the Teenage Apocalypse trilogy shook up indie/outsider/DIY moviemaking back in the 1990s (where does the time go?). “I Want Your Sex,” which ends a dozen-year drought following 2014’s underseen “White Bird in a Blizzard,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The energetic feature, which Araki co-wrote with Slutever founder Karley Sciortino, draws heavily from the filmmaker’s love for classic screwball comedy and talent for button-pushing. The result is a thoroughly entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking satire ready to grapple with art, politics, romance, and generational division.
In tandem with “The Invite,” which she also directed, Olivia Wilde notches a second memorable 2026 performance as Erika Tracey, a ruthless visual artist whose hire of young Elliot Bell (Cooper Hoffman) rapidly leads to a wholly unethical BDSM relationship complicated and compounded by Elliot’s feelings for longtime bestie/roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) and post-doc bookworm girlfriend Minerva (Charlie XCX). Hoffman, drilling down on the Benjamin Braddock/Harold Chasen territory staked out in “Licorice Pizza,” makes the most of another golden opportunity to express lustful longing and drifting confusion in a young man/older woman dynamic.
And Wilde is top-of-game as the prowling, predatory Erika. Applying nuances, layers and shades not visible in the deliberately cartoonish version of the woman that exists on the page, Wilde manages a miracle in carving sympathy for the outwardly calculating and devilishly diabolical artist. Erika, whose high-ticket erotic pieces fund and fuel a Warhol-like factory managed by consigliere/business partner Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), saves her most intense acts of creation for the performative roleplay that defines her doomed dalliance with Elliot. Initially, Araki frames the exhilarating humiliation through the eyes of the young initiate as a kind of kinky bildungsroman, but by the time climax is reached, Erika has emerged to mirror her silver screen precursor, the venerable Norma Desmond.
Some of the juice can be attributed to Araki’s cinephilia; “I Want Your Sex” is, among other things, a glorious and candy-colored homage to Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (with winks to “9 ½ Weeks” and some Hitchcockian glitter bombs tossed in for good measure). Erika is not merely a cruel sadist toying with a helpless mouse. In Elliot, she finds a willing and eager pupil (Araki swapped the originally planned dom/sub genders in the wake of #MeToo). Like Norma, Erika completes her own meaningful arc and in so doing, personifies what David Lubin describes as Gloria Swanson’s “explosive mixture of power and pathos.”
Several critics have picked up on Araki’s invitation to twenty-something viewers who might otherwise be missing out on IRL human contact and intimacy in our screen-mediated climate. In an interview with Owen Myers for “The Guardian,” Araki suggests that “I Want Your Sex” exists in direct opposition to “this culture of oppression and fascism with the dictatorship of our current administration.” The movie refrains from the most obvious and direct politicization, but Araki’s sex positive sentiments are unmistakable.