‘I Want Your Sex’ Review – Pain, Pleasure And All the Sweet Colors

Gregg Araki is genuinely one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today, as he has always had a particular interest in people who are horny, lonely, confused, self-destructive, and generally making a mess of their lives. I Want Your Sex is very much a Gregg Araki movie in that regard. It begins with Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) dragging the apparently lifeless body of Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) out of a swimming pool, then immediately jumps back nine and a half weeks to explain how exactly a naive young man ended up in that situation. The answer involves contemporary art, BDSM, manipulation, obsession, murder mysteries, and a relationship that becomes far more complicated than Elliot ever expected when he takes a job as the studio assistant to Erika, a famous artist and provocateur. Quite the plot, isn’t it?

The film is at its best when it focuses on the relationship between Elliot and Erika. Olivia Wilde is phenomenal here. This is some of the best work of her career, and she disappears into the character in a way that makes it easy to forget you’re watching an actor perform; between this and The Invite, Olivia Wilde is doing some of the best work of her career. Her Erika is this charismatic, sexually confident, intelligent, manipulative person who is impossible to fully pin down. Wilde plays her as someone who understands exactly how much power she has over the people around her, yet she never turns Erika into this cartoonish femme fatale. There is something genuinely believable about her confidence. She doesn’t feel like an actress playing a sexually liberated woman for shock value. She feels like a person who has spent years constructing her own image and knows exactly how to use it.

That confidence also makes Erika a difficult character to trust, which is where the film gets most of its tension. Elliot is drawn to her because she seems to possess everything he doesn’t and desires. He is awkward and mostly inexperienced, but there is also a genuine curiosity and sexual confidence to him that keeps him from becoming a completely passive character. Cooper Hoffman does some really good and solid work here. Elliot is clearly fascinated by Erika, but he is also fascinated by the version of himself he becomes around her. The more time he spends with her, the more he begins to believe that he is finally becoming interesting.

The problem is that Erika knows exactly how to feed that feeling. Their relationship develops through a BDSM dynamic that the film takes more seriously than the title or marketing might suggest. Erika is dominant, Elliot is submissive, and the film is interested in what happens when the boundaries between sexual exploration, emotional attachment, and manipulation begin to blur. I appreciated that the movie doesn’t treat BDSM and kink as inherently sinister or reduce the subject to a collection of sensational images. There is a genuine interest in questions of consent, power, trust, and the way people can become emotionally dependent on relationships that are clearly unhealthy for them. 

That said, the film is less outrageous than you might expect from Gregg Araki. It has plenty of provocative material, and anyone unfamiliar with his work may still find it shocking, but I Want Your Sex feels surprisingly contained. It spends a lot of time setting up the idea of a film that is going to completely go off the rails, only to pull back before it becomes as confrontational as it seems to promise. Araki’s earlier work often feels like it is actively trying to provoke the audience; for example, look at Mysterious Skin or The Living End. Here, the movie seems more interested in discussing its ideas than truly challenging the viewers. 

That is both a strength and a weakness. The film is more thoughtful because it doesn’t simply use sex and kink as decoration, but at the same time, there are moments where you can feel it holding back. For a movie built around a provocative artist who turns her own disappearance into an elaborate piece of performance art, I Want Your Sex can feel oddly safe.

The visual design is one of the film’s more consistent pleasures. Erika’s home and studio have a very specific aesthetic, and the production design helps create the sense that her entire life has been turned into an extension of her art. Her costumes are especially memorable as every outfit feels carefully chosen to communicate something about how Erika wants to be seen. The film understands that Erika doesn’t simply exist within a constructed image, but rather she is constantly creating one. It’s so easy to love simple details like that.

The same can’t always be said for the screenplay. There are some interesting ideas here about contemporary art, celebrity, sexual performance, and the way people turn their own lives into content, but the movie occasionally struggles to connect them. The crime story is a particularly strange fit. The opening suggests a much darker mystery than the film eventually delivers, and the story keeps returning to the question of what happened to Erika even though the answer is ultimately less interesting than the relationship that came before it.

The third act is the weakest part of the film. By that point, the story has already explored most of the interesting material between Elliot and Erika, and the later developments feel increasingly like a series of ideas being added because the movie needs somewhere else to go. There are also some time jumps that are an interesting choice, which show Elliot’s life years after Erika’s disappearance and allow us to see the long-term effect she has had on him. But the final stretch never quite finds the same energy as the earlier relationship. It can be argued that the third act of the film is probably the weakest.

Chase Sui Wonders is another highlight. As Apple, Elliot’s best friend and roommate, she brings a naturalness to the film that helps ground some of its more heightened material. Unfortunately, she disappears from the movie far too soon. Once Apple leaves Elliot’s life, I kept wishing she would return because her relationship with him provided a useful contrast to Erika. She is one of the few people who seems to recognize what Elliot is doing to himself, and the movie could have used more of her perspective.

The rest of the ensemble is strong, even if some of the characters are less interesting than the actors playing them. Daveed Diggs, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho and Mason Gooding fit the ensemble and world really well. Charli XCX, however, feels wasted as Minerva. The character is underwritten and doesn’t have much to do, which makes it difficult to get a sense of what she brings to the story. I wouldn’t be surprised if part of the appeal for her was simply getting the opportunity to work with Araki, because the role itself doesn’t offer much beyond being the girlfriend who brings unfulfillment to Elliot.

What I found most interesting about I Want Your Sex is how much of it is about performance. Erika performs sexuality. Elliot performs confidence where the art world performs authenticity. Even the crime surrounding Erika’s disappearance eventually becomes another performance, another way of controlling how people see her and increasing the value of her work. Everyone is constantly deciding what version of themselves they want other people to believe in.

Elliot is especially vulnerable to that. He begins the movie as someone who wants to be interesting, and Erika gives him a shortcut. She makes him feel like he has entered a more exciting world simply by being close to her. The danger is that he gradually loses track of where his own desires end and Erika’s influence begins.

That is where Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde work so well together. Their chemistry isn’t simply about attraction. It is about the imbalance between them. Erika has experience, confidence, and a very clear understanding of the game she is playing. Elliot is still figuring out what game he wants to play in the first place. Hoffman captures the excitement and confusion of that perfectly, while Wilde makes Erika seem like someone who can turn any interaction into an opportunity to regain control.

The movie’s biggest issue is that it sometimes seems more interested in the idea of being provocative than actually pushing its ideas as far as they could go. There is a thoughtful exploration of sex, sexuality, power, and emotional dependency here, but the film occasionally feels like it is standing just outside its own most interesting questions. It wants to discuss how people use sex to control one another and how sexual relationships can become emotionally complicated, but it doesn’t always have enough to say beyond the initial setup.

Even so, I Want Your Sex remains an entertaining and occasionally fascinating film because its central performances are so committed. Wilde is fearless, Hoffman is excellent, and Chase Sui Wonders leaves an impression despite being given far too little to do. The film’s style is strong, the ideas are worthwhile, and there is a genuine attempt to treat sexuality as something more complicated than a source of cheap shock.

It just isn’t quite as wild as it thinks it is. There is a better, stranger movie buried somewhere inside I Want Your Sex, one that might have pushed harder into the contradictions between art and exploitation, consent and manipulation, and the difference between sexual freedom and emotional control. What is here is still often compelling, particularly whenever Wilde and Hoffman are sharing the screen, but the film becomes less interesting the further it moves away from them.

I enjoyed it, though, and fans of Greg Araki will as well. I Want Your Sex is a stylish, funny, provocative, and occasionally more thoughtful movie than its title suggests. It has a terrific Olivia Wilde performance at its center, a strong performance from Cooper Hoffman, and a willingness to take its sexual themes seriously even when the screenplay itself begins to lose focus. It may not be the boldest or most outrageous film Gregg Araki has ever made, but there is enough going on here to make it worth watching. And when Olivia Wilde is on screen, completely inhabiting Erika Tracy and daring you to figure out whether you’re watching a woman, an artist, a performance, or all three at once, the film becomes exactly as compelling as it wants to be.

I Want Your Sex will debut exclusively in theaters on July 31, 2026, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. 

Before we let you go, we have officially launched our merch store! Check out all of our amazing apparel when you click here and type in GVN15 at checkout for a 15% discount!

---

For major deals and money off on Amazon, make sure to use our affiliate link! If you are purchasing any of the latest and best in physical media at MovieZyng, you can support us using our affiliate link.