I Want Your Sex (2026)

Gregg Araki hasn’t made a film in twelve years. “I Want Your Sex” announces itself as an event before a single frame plays, and for roughly half of its ninety minutes, it earns that outright. Then it doesn’t.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a directionless twentysomething with a soft, apologetic face, lands a job assisting Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an artist and provocateur whose gallery openings function as a kind of performance art in themselves. She wants a muse. He wants, well, everything Araki’s camera keeps insisting he wants. What follows moves through the Los Angeles art scene like a fever, obsession curdling into something closer to danger, though I won’t say where it lands.

Wilde is the film’s best argument for itself. She plays Erika as a woman who has decided sincerity is a costume, worn only when useful, and there is real pleasure in watching her calibrate exactly how much of herself to show a room. Hoffman is harder to read, sometimes deliberately blank in a way that suits Elliot’s passivity, sometimes just blank. When the two of them share a frame the film crackles. When they don’t, it stalls.

And it stalls often. Araki, working from a script he co-wrote with Karley Sciortino, seems less interested in where the story goes than in how garish he can make the getting there. Colour saturates every scene until it stops meaning anything; a needle-drop arrives roughly every four minutes, and by the halfway mark I found myself anticipating them rather than feeling them. Araki has a reputation for turning excess into a weapon rather than a crutch. Here it feels more like habit than argument. Charli XCX, limited by a shooting schedule squeezed between tour dates, appears mostly at the edges, a texture rather than a character. Daveed Diggs fares slightly better, given a handful of scenes sharp enough to make you wish the film trusted its supporting cast more.

What I kept returning to, watching this, was how much better it works as a series of moments than as a whole. A dinner-party scene midway through, all barbed dialogue and unspoken threat, is close to the film I wanted for ninety minutes. A late confrontation lands with real weight. But the connective tissue between these peaks is thin, and Araki seems to know it, papering over the gaps with style rather than earning the transitions honestly.

It’s fun, often, and smart in flashes, usually courtesy of Wilde. Does it add up to anything past the sum of its provocations? Not quite. I left the cinema entertained in patches and unmoved as a whole. Araki still has something to say about desire, shame, and performance in a culture too online and too frightened of sincerity to be honest about any of the three. He just hasn’t quite said it here.