Too much digital ink has been spilled over the younger generation’s sexual pessimism and aversion to sex on screen. It seems that online discourse among Gen Z has increasingly framed sex through the language of objectification, trauma and consent, often treating sexuality itself as suspect. Unsurprisingly, the arguments over sex scenes have become perennial fodder for the film community: whether they’re gratuitous or necessary, exploitative or artistically justified, with the same familiar impasse resurfacing time and again.
On paper, Gregg Araki is the perfect filmmaker to combat this puriteen moral panic. The New Queer Cinema luminary has spent decades making films with sex as an essential register of youth, desire, alienation and self-discovery. Returning to narrative filmmaking after 12 years with a “sex-positive love letter for Gen Z”, Araki finds himself in the position of persuading a generation shaped by self-policing and surveillance that a life lived on the edge – messy and liberated from judgment – can be desirable. Fittingly, his answer takes the form of a dom/sub relationship between a provocative contemporary artist (Olivia Wilde) whose hedonistic lifestyle and gleefully anti-woke provocations create a toxic work environment after she hires the wide-eyed, younger Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) as her assistant.
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Wilde is electric, embracing her character’s allure, authority and cruelty. As Erika she calls the shots, offering Elliot a gateway to a world of sexual discovery and allowing him to explore desire and submissiveness without apprehension or regret. Opposite her, Hoffman balances curiosity, vulnerability and abandon with a great gift for physical comedy. The duo’s dynamic gives the film a pulse that’s securely tethered to their chemistry, and they’re surrounded by a charming, uniformly strong supporting cast. Chase Sui Wonders as Elliot’s sexually repressed roommate Apple, and Johnny Knoxville and Margaret Cho as a pair of po-faced detectives are particular standouts, but Charli XCX as Elliot’s apathetic girlfriend, Minerva, adopts an unconvincing accent that breaks the spell enough to suggest that if her latest album, ‘Music, Fashion, Film’, is a statement of artistic ambition, perhaps her future in film should lie more behind the camera.
There’s a moment in the film where, in response to the idea that an artist is worth more dead than alive, a supporting character responds: “Welcome to the sad reality of now.” It’s a line that feels paradoxically reflexive in the context of cinema, where even filmmakers who have shown a profound command of craft and style are not immune to the sterile digital sheen of the new age. The colours and textures of celluloid that once defined Araki’s work are here replaced with flat lighting, incongruous set pieces and fewer of the bold visual flourishes that once propelled his films with kinetic force and personality. Its art-world satire, too, occasionally slips into familiar, dated territory. Still, Araki avoids any simplistic defence of sexual liberation, examining instead how erotic freedom and exploitation are uncomfortable bedfellows, and embracing the contradictions that contemporary discourse often struggles to accommodate.
