‘I Want Your Sex’ Review: Gregg Araki Returns to Peak Provocation With a Wicked, Self-Aware Power Play
Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in 'I Want Your Sex.' Lacey Terrell/Courtesy of Sundance
Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is a fearless, darkly funny provocation — a subversive erotic satire that uses kink, control, and desire as tools to interrogate generational politics, intimacy, and self-mythologizing in contemporary culture.
Gregg Araki has never been interested in polite cinema. From the scorched nihilism of The Living End to the apocalyptic yearning of Nowhere, his films have always treated sex not as titillation but as language — a way people speak when they no longer trust words. With I Want Your Sex, Araki returns after an 11-year absence from features not to soften his edges, but to sharpen them, delivering one of his most lucid, funny, and perversely reflective films to date.
At first glance, I Want Your Sex plays like a provocation engineered to inflame Sundance audiences: a Gen-Z assistant enters a sexually dominant relationship with his older, famous, deeply manipulative boss — a contemporary artist whose work, worldview, and erotic power are inseparable. But Araki, working with co-writer Karley Sciortino, isn’t interested in scandal for its own sake. Instead, he constructs a satirical labyrinth where consent, power, self-fashioning, and generational anxiety constantly slide out of alignment.
The film opens with a sly noir fake-out, flashing forward to what appears to be the death of Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), floating face-down in a swimming pool. The image evokes classic Hollywood melodrama — Sunset Boulevard by way of Instagram culture — before rewinding nine and a half weeks to chart how Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), a directionless 23-year-old, found himself pulled into Erika’s orbit.
Elliot is introduced as capable but unmoored, intelligent but unassertive. Recently graduated, he lands a job as a junior assistant in Erika’s studio, a space that doubles as an art factory, ideological echo chamber, and erotic testing ground. The film wastes no time establishing the imbalance. Erika is older, wealthier, famous, and utterly uninterested in pretending otherwise. She dresses with deliberate excess, speaks in aphorisms that feel half sincere and half weaponized, and radiates the confidence of someone who has spent years turning her desires into both brand and commodity.
Wilde is electric here. This is easily one of her most fearless performances, not because of nudity or kink — though the film has no shortage of either — but because of how completely she commits to Erika’s contradictions. Erika is brilliant and shallow, manipulative and strangely honest, cruel and occasionally self-lacerating. Wilde plays her not as a villain or fantasy, but as a woman who has mistaken self-knowledge for absolution.
The sexual dynamic between Erika and Elliot unfolds less like seduction than indoctrination. Their first encounter is framed as an interview — a familiar Araki move, staging power as bureaucracy. Elliot is reprimanded for imagined impropriety, tested for boundaries he doesn’t yet know how to articulate, and reassured that everything will be consensual because paperwork has already been signed. Consent, in I Want Your Sex, is never absent — but it is constantly contextualized, reframed, and strained.
Hoffman, who continues to prove himself one of the most interesting actors of his generation, plays Elliot with a mix of eagerness and confusion that never collapses into passivity. His Elliot is not naïve so much as unformed, hungry for structure, approval, and sensation in equal measure. The film resists the easy reading of grooming or victimhood, instead forcing the audience to sit in the uncomfortable gray space where desire and exploitation overlap without clean resolution.
Araki and Sciortino structure the film around repeated interrogations, flashing back and forth between Elliot recounting events to two detectives — played with unexpected restraint by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville — and the increasingly elaborate sexual and emotional rituals he shares with Erika. The procedural framing allows the film to question narrative reliability itself. Is Elliot confessing? Defending? Performing? Even he doesn’t seem entirely sure.
As Erika’s demands escalate — collars, commands, humiliation staged as liberation — the film never sensationalizes the acts themselves. Instead, Araki treats kink as theater, as rehearsal, as identity play. What begins as erotic experimentation slowly reveals itself as an asymmetrical relationship built on mythology: Erika’s mythology of herself as radical truth-teller, and Elliot’s mythology of submission as clarity.
The supporting cast deepens the film’s generational critique. Mason Gooding is a standout as Zap, Elliot’s gay co-worker, who exists in a parallel sexual universe defined by confidence, boundaries, and unapologetic pleasure. Chase Sui Wonders brings sharp wit and emotional grounding as Apple, Elliot’s closest friend, whose concern is less moralistic than practical — she sees the damage accumulating before Elliot can articulate it himself.
Charli xcx, used with sly restraint, is perfectly cast as Minerva, Elliot’s girlfriend, whose emotional absence and sexual disinterest form the negative space that makes Erika’s intensity feel intoxicating. Daveed Diggs steals scenes as Erika’s business manager, a corporate enabler who understands scandal as opportunity and collapse as content.
As the narrative progresses, I Want Your Sex subtly shifts its center of gravity. The early sections are buoyant, outrageous, and gleefully confrontational. But midway through, the film begins to interrogate its own provocations. Erika’s control curdles into manipulation. Elliot’s submission starts to look less like choice and more like erosion. The art world satire sharpens, skewering the ease with which transgression is commodified, scandal rebranded, and trauma reframed as authenticity.
The film’s climactic unraveling — set against the opening of Erika’s latest exhibition — is one of Araki’s most controlled sequences. The chaos is emotional rather than physical, driven by revelation, betrayal, and the slow collapse of narratives both characters have told themselves. When the film finally returns to the image of the pool, it does so not as a punchline but as an ethical reckoning.
Araki resists neat conclusions. The film’s final act jumps forward in time, offering neither punishment nor absolution, but transformation. Elliot is changed, not cured. Erika is diminished, not destroyed. Power, the film suggests, is never static — it mutates, reconfigures, and survives its own exposure.
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Visually, I Want Your Sex is unmistakably Araki: neon-kissed interiors, pop-art inserts, fetishistic costuming, and a color palette that oscillates between bubblegum fantasy and bruised reality. The film is funny — often wickedly so — but its humor is edged with melancholy, the sense that sexual freedom without accountability can become just another form of performance.
What ultimately makes I Want Your Sex so effective is its refusal to moralize. Araki doesn’t instruct the audience on what to think. He invites discomfort, contradiction, and laughter in equal measure. In an era where discourse around sex often collapses into absolutism, I Want Your Sex insists on ambiguity — messy, human, unresolved.
At 66, Gregg Araki isn’t chasing relevance. He’s interrogating it — and reminding us that provocation, when wielded with intelligence and self-awareness, can still be a form of truth.
Rating: ★★★★½
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“Provocative, funny, and unexpectedly reflective, I Want Your Sex finds Gregg Araki in rare form — using erotic satire not to shock, but to expose the fragile myths we build around desire, power, and self-knowledge.”
CREDITS
Airdate: January 2026 | Sundance Film Festival
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Charli xcx, Daveed Diggs
Creators: Director Gregg Araki; Writers Gregg Araki, Karley Sciortino
Out Now: Festival Circuit
Rating: R
