I Want Your Sex (2026)
Directed by: Gregg Araki
Premise: Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is hired to be the assistant to Erika (Olivia Wilde), a famous creator who specializes in making erotic art. Elliot enters into a dominant/submissive relationship with Erika which complicates their work life.
What Works: In the 1990s filmmaker Gregg Araki made a series of edgy movies, namely The Doom Generation and 1997’s Nowhere. These films were surreal, violent, and sexual but also funny. I Want Your Sex plays as a throwback to those movies but through a contemporary lens. Since the 1990s, work culture has changed. Office romances have become much more fraught and relations between supervisors and their employees are largely a thing of the past. I Want Your Sex pits the free spiritedness often required of art against the restrictions of a modern workplace. Erika, the artist and supervisor, is self-absorbed and uninhibited. She claims to explore the sociology of sex in her work while divorcing eroticism from emotional investment in her personal life. Her attitudes are reflected in the way she runs her business and treats her employees. Erika invites her assistant Elliot into a sexual relationship and much of the story is about Elliot’s sexual awakening. Erika expands his erotic palate and through those experiences Elliot breaks out of his malaise. In the process, Elliot’s capacity and desire for emotional attachment is also awakened but frustrated by Erikas’s disinterest. I Want Your Sex satirizes the art world and the desire of artists to push boundaries but it is also about the degree to which provocation is a pose and the way hedonism stripped of humanism is handicapped in its ability to explore the human condition.
What Doesn’t: The storytelling of I Want Your Sex is messy. In some ways that’s appropriate to the nature of the film. A lot of mainstream Hollywood storytelling is very neat. I Want Your Sex is about the way compartmentalizing sexuality and emotions is futile. However, the plotting of I Want Your Sex is strained. The film has a flashback structure with Elliot interrogated by the police. It’s a pretense for Elliot to narrate the story of his relationship with Erika. Little is gained from the flashback structure. The end of the movie doesn’t really come to anything. The flashback sets up an expectation about where this is all going. The reversal of our expectations feels like a cheap trick. It doesn’t reveal anything about the film’s themes about sexuality, relationships, and art. Instead it comes across as a quick way to tie off the narrative and end the film.
Bottom Line: Like so many of Gregg Araki’s movies, I Want Your Sex is funny and daring. The filmmakers lose their way in the ending but I Want Your Sex offers a lot to think about regarding sexuality, relationships, and art.
Episode: #1111 (August 9, 2026)