James Y. Lee
How we’ve missed you, Gregg Araki. Not just in the sense that his last feature film was made over 12 years ago, and not just in the sense that he’s ventured into brief bouts of television work for series like 13 Reasons Why and Dahmer (good God!)—but in the sense that he’s finally back to making films in his voice about sexual themes, transgressions, boundary-pushing, and otherwise.
In the years since Araki’s late-’90s and early-oughts prime, Gen Z’s conception of sex has steadily become entrenched in shame, repression, and self-pity. Incels slithered out into fringe internet cultures as the terminally online result of antisocial, predominantly hetero-male, sexual entitlement. The rates of 18-25-year-olds who’ve effectively abstained from sex and partnership have skyrocketed. Birth rates across the country have fallen to a catastrophic low, driven by an existential fear of the future and a pitiably rich-serving economy. There’s a growingly puritanical undercurrent of young people, chained to social media platforms, who earnestly believe that sex scenes aren’t “necessary” for a film’s progression, who are so alienated by sex as a component of relationships that discussions of even mildly kinky elements are treated as objects of disgust. (Trust me, as someone in this generation, it’s shockingly hard to avoid.)
Who better to wake us up to our senses, then, than one of our premier cinematic court jesters, who’s returned to form with I Want Your Sex, a deeply hilarious film about BDSM, raunchily troubled power dynamics, and sexual awakening in younger generations? The hermetically sealed nature of the online generation collides with the dangerously unabashed earnestness of the mind behind The Doom Generation (1995) to incredibly entertaining results. Araki’s updated his heavily stylized aesthetic for the digital era, where so many young people have sealed themselves off in their own devices that any notion of in-person and physical risk seems unfathomably dangerous. But I Want Your Sex boldly dispels any notion of danger too severe to venture into. Rather, Araki openly suggests that sex and its kinkier forms may be a risk worth taking for certain kinds of young people in order to figure out what kind of person they’re willing to be.
So, who is Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) willing to be? We catch a brief glimpse of it in the opening scene: he’s scantily dressed in lingerie and bleeding from his nose. He spots, off in the distance, the Sunset Boulevard-esque sighting of a nude Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), seemingly drowned in the pool in her massive residence, and leaps in to save her. But before we know what happened to her, we jump back several weeks, back to when Elliot fell under Erika’s employ. Erika’s a renowned avant-garde visual artist, with her entire aesthetic predicated on images of strong sexuality. Her brash attitude towards art extends to her employees and assistants. And eventually, it extends to Elliot: when he applies to join her company in search of a job, he is almost immediately accepted despite his evident status as an outsider.
For the first twenty minutes or so of I Want Your Sex, the handle’s a bit lost on what sort of chronology we should be following. First, we’re in the future; then we jump to the past, months prior; but then, we also jump a little farther before that to provide some context, all while the “present-day” narrative is intercut with an interrogation subplot with Elliot and two detectives (Margaret Cho and… Johnny Knoxville?!). It takes a bit to get used to the film’s temporal logic, but once it finds a linear consistency, the ball really gets rolling—especially given that Erika doesn’t hesitate for a second in bringing Elliot under her wing, and Elliot likewise doesn’t hesitate in acquiescing. After a few spiels about the tendency towards virginity in Gen Z, Erika and Elliot immediately establish an intensely kinky dom-sub relationship. And it’s abundantly clear that Elliot finds greater satisfaction in it than in his current, deeply sexually frustrated relationship to prudish aspiring scientist Minerva (a hilarious against-type Charli xcx, albeit with a somewhat confused accent).
Wilde and Hoffman are very much worth an abundance of kudos for the extent to which they fearlessly push their respective roles. Wilde, in particular, seems to be on the turnaround from Don’t Worry Darling (2022) with this role and the release of her much-praised The Invite (2026), and what a performance to announce her resurgence with. Erika Tracy is an absurdly singular character, fiendishly confident and sexy, monstrous in her artistic megalomania, embracing transgression as progress while also evidently wielding it for self-servingly performative ends. She’s a hilarious satire of the art world’s pretensions, and it’s never in question just how much of her sexual identity is geared toward manipulating Elliot. It’s also never in question, however, just how much she’s also waking Elliot up to parts of himself he wasn’t previously aware of.
Hot off the heels of The Long Walk (2025), Hoffman completely sells Elliot as a bumblingly ordinary man who’s both in over his head and is also aware of exactly how liberating his bond with Erika is to him and his sense of self. The end result is a total commitment to Elliot and to the identity he assumes, so much so that the hilarious depth of his immersion is rivaled only by Harry Melling’s lead performance in Pillion (2025). Wilde and Hoffman play off of each other with effortless chemistry; an unstoppable force slamming into a pathetically movable object, the latter of whom grows to realize just exactly how willing he is to be cratered in the process. The supporting cast around them also helps, for the most part. Chase Sui Wonders provides some meaningful heart as Elliot’s best friend, Apple; Daveed Diggs hilariously serves as Vikktor, Erika’s shadowy assistant and right-hand; and Mason Gooding as Zap is at least doing his best with a handful of gay jokes that aren’t always bullseyes.
All sorts of dubious dynamics are certainly at play with Elliot and Erika, the manipulations of which grow clearer as the film unfolds, and boundaries grow blurrier over time. But here, Araki is largely veering clear of the darker corners of violence that have shadowed his previous work. You won’t see, for instance, anything along the lines of the horrific abuse lining Mysterious Skin (2004), the cascading dysfunction of Totally F***ed Up (1993), or the grisly fascist carnage that concludes The Doom Generation. I Want Your Sex exists in a much more comedically inclined milieu—perhaps a recognition on Araki’s end that the extremities of his prior tragedies might cyclically contribute to the virginal self-pity that dominates younger perceptions of sex. It’s a film with a more sincere angle, parsing the problematic power dynamics that may emerge in kink, as well as what it means to receive what you want—while also recognizing the places you won’t venture to in order to get it.
It’s interesting to see Araki adapt his style in this way—not just on the tonal and comedic front, but also on the visual front. Here, pastel colors, aesthetics, and even animations are all captured on pristine digital cinematography with somewhat straightforward composition and a crisp sheen. But it’s also abundantly clear that Araki has not lost a single bit of his spiritual irreverence to his age. If anything, his age has lent him even more perspective on how to pit what young people want against what they need. He’s got observations sharp enough to cut here; that Generation Z and its adjacents have grown in an era of isolation, but that we’re also doing ourselves no favors by neurotically trapping ourselves in fatalistic narratives about relationships and our ostensibly unattainable cravings.
Yes, dear reader, this kink-focused sex comedy is a modern and mature coming-of-age tale—where our single-minded protagonist charmingly runs into various expressions of sexuality in his peers, partners, friends, and so on, to understand what suits him best. The answer he reaches is both far funnier and unique than you might be expecting—or, depending on how you view Araki’s work, exactly what you think it is.
