There is something almost offensively perfect about Gregg Araki making a film called I Want Your Sex in 2026. At a time when culture cannot decide whether sex is liberating, dangerous, cringe, therapeutic, political or something you should probably discuss with your boundaries coach first, Araki simply arrives screaming: have some sex.
Obviously, it is not that simple. Nothing with Araki ever is.
I Want Your Sex is a neon-lit, filthy, funny little grenade about desire, power, performance and the increasingly bizarre ways we understand intimacy. Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a sexually inexperienced young man who gets pulled into the orbit of Erika Tracy, an older artist played by Olivia Wilde with the kind of feral charisma that suggests she might either ruin your life or make it considerably more interesting. Probably both.
The genius of the film is that Araki does not treat Elliot’s generation as prudish idiots or Erika’s generation as sexually enlightened icons. Everyone is damaged. Everyone is performing. Everyone is horny. Everyone is also deeply, deeply online.
That makes the film feel weirdly essential to this particular moment. We have spent years turning sex into content, discourse, identity, branding and a potential HR incident. Dating apps have made intimacy feel transactional. Social media has made everyone simultaneously exhibitionist and terrified of being seen. The result is a culture obsessed with sex while becoming increasingly anxious about actually having it.
Araki’s response is not a think piece. It is a psychedelic sex comedy.
The writing, co-created with Karley Sciortino, understands that the only appropriate language for our current cultural insanity might be heightened, camp and completely unhinged. Characters talk like they have wandered out of a group chat at 3am. The jokes are deliberately filthy. The drama keeps threatening to become melodrama before swerving into something stranger. It is trashy in the most intelligent possible way.
And the cast gets it. Wilde is having an absolute ball, weaponising Erika’s confidence and making every entrance feel like an event. Hoffman is the ideal straight man, awkward enough to make Elliot believable but game enough to follow Araki into increasingly deranged territory. Around them, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs and Charli xcx add to the film’s fever-dream ecosystem.
Then there are the cameos, which feel less like celebrity stunt casting than Araki winking at his own cinematic history. James Duval’s appearance is particularly delicious, connecting this new, sexually anxious generation to the director who helped define the horny, alienated outsider cinema of the 1990s.
Is I Want Your Sex subtle? Absolutely not.
Is it occasionally ridiculous? Completely.
But subtlety is overrated when the world itself has become this ridiculous.
The real joke is that a film this aggressively sexual ends up being about something almost wholesome: the terrifying vulnerability of wanting someone. Not liking their post. Not sending a thirst trap. Not negotiating the perfect vocabulary for desire. Actually wanting. Actually risking humiliation. Actually being alive inside your own body.
That is why I Want Your Sex feels genius. It is not nostalgic for a supposedly freer sexual past. It is staring directly at our bizarre present and asking the question contemporary culture seems increasingly afraid to ask:
What if we stopped being so fucking scared of desire?