I Want Your Sex Review: Gregg Araki's Kinky Office Romance Is a Generational Cage Match

Gregg Araki opens his new film the way Billy Wilder opened Sunset Boulevard: a body floating in a swimming pool. But where Wilder gave us a dead screenwriter narrating from the grave, Araki gives us Cooper Hoffman in pink lace lingerie, blood dripping from his nose, frantically trying to rescue his boss. She’s naked, face-down, and very much alive. The cops think he did it. He can’t remember a thing.

This is I Want Your Sex, and it’s the funniest, sharpest thing Araki has made since The Doom Generation. Underneath the cartoon boobs and Johnny Knoxville wisecracks, it’s also a surprisingly coherent argument about power, consent, and what happens when a generation raised on HR training videos collides with one that never had to sit through one.

The Setup

Elliot (Hoffman) is a twenty-something struggling artist who lands a job as an assistant to Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a famous provocateur whose gallery shows involve chains, nudity, and statements about the male gaze. Erika is the kind of woman who quotes Foucault while sexually humiliating her employees, and Wilde plays her like a silent-film vampire reincarnated as a Soho gallery owner. The LA Times compared her to Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck all at once, and they’re not wrong. She glides through rooms with the confidence of someone who has never once been told “no” and means it.

Elliot, meanwhile, is already in a weird situation: his sort-of-girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX, delivering deadpan medical-student energy) refuses to sleep with him but expects monogamy. He’s frustrated, confused, and exactly the kind of soft-target that Erika’s particular brand of mentorship devours. She starts by critiquing his art. She ends by critiquing his performance in bed. The line between boss and dominatrix evaporates fast.

The Interrogation

Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino (founder of Slutever) structure the film as a police interrogation. Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville play the detectives, and their back-and-forth commentary as Elliot recounts the affair is one of the movie’s best running jokes. Cho’s detective is skeptical and sharp. Knoxville’s is dim and increasingly invested in the emotional dynamics of Elliot’s sex life. At one point he earnestly asks Elliot to clarify whether a sex act was consensual “in the vibe sense.” The interrogation scenes break up what could otherwise be a straightforward story into something closer to a deposition, and the question hanging over everything is the same one the detectives keep asking: who was using who?

The structure also lets Araki do something clever. Because Elliot is narrating his own story to the cops, we never know how much is memory and how much is self-justification. The cartoon sequences — Minerva’s bouncing animated breasts, Elliot melting into his mattress after rejection — could be Araki’s signature surrealism, or they could be Elliot embellishing. The film never tells you which. For a movie about a guy who can’t remember the night his boss nearly died, that ambiguity is the point.

The tone is pitched somewhere between Secretary and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

What It’s Actually About

The easy read on I Want Your Sex is that it’s a gender-swapped #MeToo story — powerful older woman exploits younger male subordinate, and we’re supposed to laugh. And yes, if the genders were reversed, this would be a horror movie. Araki knows that. The film doesn’t pretend Erika is sympathetic. She’s manipulative, selfish, and uses her position to extract sex from someone who can’t realistically say no. The script, by Araki and Sciortino, doesn’t ask us to root for her.

But it doesn’t ask us to root for Elliot either. He’s not a victim in any simple sense — he’s compliant, eager, and at several points actively disrespects Erika’s boundaries in his own way. The European femme fatale who shows up midway through the film (Roxane Mesquida) gets the movie’s thesis line. After Elliot demonstrates what he’s “learned” from Erika, she recoils. “This is not erotic,” she says. “This is performance.”

That’s the key. The sex in this movie isn’t hot. It’s artificial, ridiculous, belabored. Araki and Sciortino are making a point about what happens when sex becomes a transaction dressed up as liberation. Erika genuinely believes she’s freeing Elliot from his repressive Gen Z hang-ups. Elliot genuinely believes he’s being mentored. Neither of them is right, and the film is clear-eyed about both.

What makes the movie more interesting than a simple morality play is that it doesn’t land on a tidy verdict. Erika’s belief that art should shock, that boundaries are for boring people, that the only worthwhile sex is transgressive sex — all of this is presented as genuinely seductive. You can feel why Elliot falls for it. The movie isn’t wagging its finger; it’s watching two people spiral into a dynamic neither of them fully controls, and it’s letting us decide how much sympathy each one deserves.

The LA Times review noted that the movie anticipates its own backlash: yes, if the genders were reversed this would be a horror movie. Araki and Sciortino know that too. The question the film actually seems to be asking isn’t “is Erika a predator?” — she obviously is — but “why does Elliot keep saying yes?” And the answer isn’t a gotcha about male fragility. It’s about what happens when someone who’s been taught that desire is dangerous meets someone who insists it’s the only thing that matters.

The Cast

Hoffman, last seen holding his own in Licorice Pizza, is the film’s secret weapon. He plays Elliot as a man so desperate for approval that he’ll mistake any attention for affection. His face cycles through confusion, arousal, terror, and devotion so fluidly that you’re never quite sure which one is the real emotion. He’s not a victim in the traditional sense, but he’s not an equal either — he’s a guy who doesn’t know the game he’s playing, playing against someone who wrote the rulebook.

Wilde is having the time of her life. Her Erika Tracy is a monster, but she’s a fascinating one — the kind of person who built a career on being “transgressive” in the ’90s and early 2000s and is starting to realize the culture has moved past her. She still gets coverage in Artforum, but the students at her talks ask pointed questions about exploitation. Watching Wilde register that flicker of uncertainty beneath the vamping is one of the film’s quiet pleasures.

The supporting cast is stacked. Daveed Diggs appears as Erika’s long-suffering gallery manager Vikktor, radiating the exhausted loyalty of someone who’s been managing chaos for a decade. Mason Gooding plays Zap, another assistant whose trust-fund background makes him hilariously unbothered by the workplace dysfunction. Chase Sui Wonders is Elliot’s roommate Apple, who gets pulled into one of the couple’s experiments and emerges as the movie’s moral compass — the one person who sees the setup clearly and says so. And Charli XCX, in her first substantial film role, is a revelation: her Minerva is cold, brilliant, and somehow both the most emotionally mature and the most emotionally withholding person in the room.

Where This Fits in Araki’s Career

Araki has been making films since the late ’80s, but his career has two distinct phases. There’s the angry young Araki of The Living End (1992), Totally F**ed Up* (1993), and The Doom Generation (1995) — his “Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy” — which treated filmmaking as an act of cultural arson. Then there’s the mature Araki of Mysterious Skin (2004) and the TV series Now Apocalypse (2019), who channeled his outrage into more conventional narrative forms without losing the edge.

I Want Your Sex sits somewhere between these two modes. It has the anarchic energy of the early work — the cartoon interludes, the provocateur’s instinct to push every button at once — but it’s structured like a real movie, with character arcs and thematic coherence and an actual ending. For a filmmaker who spent the ’90s refusing to color inside any lines, it’s fascinating to watch him discover that the box can be useful. The interrogation frame gives the chaos a shape. The jokes land harder because they’re aimed at something.

This is also Araki’s most explicitly heterosexual film, which is a strange thing to say about a queer filmmaker, but it’s true. The central relationship is between a man and a woman, and the movie’s interest in power dynamics doesn’t depend on the gender of either participant. Araki has always been more interested in desire as a force than in desire as an identity, and I Want Your Sex makes that case more clearly than anything he’s done since Mysterious Skin.

Does It Stick the Landing?

The third act gets a little wobbly. Araki has always had trouble with endings — his early films tended to end in bursts of violence or just sort of stop — and I Want Your Sex is no exception. The resolution of the police investigation feels rushed, and a late-breaking emotional reveal lands harder than the script seems to anticipate. But the movie earns enough goodwill in its first 80 minutes that the wobble doesn’t sink it.

More importantly, it’s a film that actually has something to say about the moment we’re in. The generational tension isn’t just window dressing. Erika’s worldview — art should shock, sex should be dangerous, boundaries are for boring people — is presented as genuinely seductive and genuinely inadequate. Elliot’s generation, raised on trigger warnings and consent workshops, is presented as genuinely cautious and genuinely unable to tell the difference between safety and avoidance. Neither position wins. Neither position is mocked. Araki and Sciortino are interested in the friction itself, and the movie is funniest when those worldviews collide in bed.

I Want Your Sex is in theaters now. It’s not for everyone — the sex is explicit, the humor is dark, and at least one scene will make you genuinely wonder what you just watched. But if you’ve missed the version of Gregg Araki who made The Living End and Nowhere, the one who treated filmmaking like a Molotov cocktail, he’s back. And he brought Olivia Wilde, a cartoon rack, and a genuinely interesting argument about power with him.