Twelve years after his last feature, Gregg Araki comes back loud, in lipstick pink and electric blue, with a movie that treats horniness as a subject worth taking seriously precisely by refusing to take it seriously at all. I Want Your Sex opens on a body in a swimming pool, an assistant standing over it covered in blood and dressed for an entirely different kind of evening, and two detectives who clearly don't believe a word of his story. Everything after that is a rewind explaining how he got there.
Cooper Hoffman plays that assistant, Elliot, an aimless twentysomething who takes a job at a famous artist's studio and is quickly promoted to something else: her muse, her plaything, and the latest name added to a legend she's spent years constructing about herself. Olivia Wilde plays that artist, Erika, and she's the reason the film works as well as it does. Where a lesser script would've reduced Erika to an outfit and a catchphrase, Wilde makes her genuinely funny — someone who knows exactly how a room is looking at her and uses that knowledge like a weapon.
Wilde plays Erika as someone who's turned her own contradictions into a personal brand, and the film is smart enough to let her get away with it.
The film is at its sharpest when it lets that contradiction breathe: Erika preaches total freedom while insisting on total control of the terms, and Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino use the Elliot-Erika dynamic to needle at something real about consent and generational miscommunication, rather than just staging a May-December farce. There's a nice moment where the script seems ready to write Elliot's whole generation off as sexless and screen-numbed, only for Elliot himself to push back — what looks like repression to Erika reads, to him, more like caution learned the hard way.
Hoffman wisely doesn't try to match Wilde's wattage; he plays Elliot as perpetually out of his depth without turning him into a punchline, and the character's arc is less about gaining confidence than about getting honest with himself about what he actually wants. The ensemble around them does a lot of quiet heavy lifting too, particularly Mason Gooding as Elliot's coworker Zap, who gets some of the film's best line readings simply by being the one person on screen who can see exactly what's happening.
Where the film loses a step is the mystery scaffolding holding it together. The pool-side opening promises a proper noir, but the whodunit mostly just exists to give the flashback structure somewhere to return to, and by the time it needs to actually resolve, the plot mechanics tighten up right when the emotional stakes should be getting messier and more complicated instead. Araki is far better at dramatizing the space between wanting someone and being humiliated by them than he is at tying a bow on a murder plot.
None of that undoes what works here. At a lean ninety minutes, the film isn't interested in delivering a grand thesis on modern intimacy, and that restlessness is part of its charm: it's a comedy about people hiding behind theory and irony because admitting how exposed desire makes them is so much harder.
