I Want Your Sex

Grade: C

Various critics and user reviewers alike are becoming professors on I Want Your Sex, waxing poetic about the message. I’m not sure what it’s trying to say. It seems to be aiming for a “get out from behind your screens once in a while, live real life, and have real sex” message, but I couldn’t grasp any obvious commentary. Before I start thinking about a metaphor, what I fundamentally look for in a movie is whether it delivers as entertainment on any level, and I Want Your Sex doesn’t. It’s not funny enough, not sexy enough, and when a thriller element emerges, it’s not thrilling enough.

Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, who begins working for Erika (Olivia Wilde) at an avant garde erotic art gallery. One of his duties is covering the outline on a canvas with discarded gum. By the time the 5-6 person “chewing line” is finished, it will be a gum sculpture shaped like a body part. It’s an unusual occupation, but he can finally pull his weight more with his best friend/roommate Apple (Chase Sui Wonders, from Bodies Bodies Bodies and 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer), and it takes his mind off the steady drift away from his perpetually studying girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX).

Erika ropes (and then later on, you could say she literally ropes) Elliot into having a raucous sexual relationship with her. Purely physical. No feelings for each other. Lots of props, leather, and things going into places that hadn’t had a thing go there before. Elliot has never felt so alive, and begins developing feelings for Erika. He wishes this was something more, and begins to see it that way.

Interestingly, I Want Your Sex began life in the mid-2010s with the genders reversed. The boss was originally a man, and the young employee a woman, but writer/director Gregg Araki reconsidered the concept after the #MeToo movement. Watching the finished film, I couldn’t help but think of Secretary, which already explored that dynamic with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Secretary did it so well that perhaps it’s for the best this movie ultimately took a different path. We already have a Secretary.

Most of the film is actually a big flashback, as Elliot tells the story to two detectives (Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho) in an interrogation room. I like Knoxville and Cho very much, and I was simultaneously happy to see them and disappointed by how little they get to do. Their parts could have been filmed in one weekend, or maybe one day. All they do is sit and ask questions. The movie opens with a panicked, almost naked Elliot discovering a body lying face down in a pool, hence the investigators, questioning, and Elliot catching them (and us) up on what’s been happening to lead to that.

This might be the last time I call Cooper Hoffman Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, as by now, he’s established himself as an actor in his own right after Licorice Pizza and The Long Walk. What Olivia Wilde does here is impressively different from her recent role in The Invite. In addition to the individual performance nominations, I wish the Oscars would create a category for the best body of work by an actor in a given year. Wilde is the kind of performer who would make that category interesting, especially with more from her coming in 2026.

Mason Gooding and Daveed Diggs do fine enough work rounding out the cast. As good as these actors are, I didn’t care enough—and was often put off by—what was happening. The cinematography is bright and bland when it’s not garish and distracting. The score is either new-agey spa music or a dance club beat. Both are annoying.

After we circle back around to what we are shown at the beginning, we get two epilogues, at least one of which doesn’t feel in line with what should be happening. Whatever I Want Your Sex is trying to do, it obviously succeeded with many critics. For me, though, the trade-off is a movie that made me feel empty. One thing it did remind me of is that old film and television cliché where characters wake up from a nightmare by sitting straight up in bed and gasping. That’s apparently alive and well.

Grade: C