‘I Want Your Sex’ review: Olivia Wilde takes control in Gregg Araki’s lacklustre sex comedy

Dir: Gregg Araki. US. 2025. 90mins

Gregg Araki’s first feature in more than a decade maps the kinky but dysfunctional carnal relationship between a vain artist and her submissive assistant. But despite this satirical comedy’s provocative title, I Want Your Sex fails to deliver on its initial promise to be an irreverent, libidinous romp. Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman sport a playful, teasing rapport as this unlikely dom-sub couple, and the film gets some mileage out of its frank subject matter. But strap-ons and threesomes only take Sex so far as it eventually becomes a disappointingly underdeveloped and fairly conventional story about the perils of no-strings-attached sexual arrangements.

More fizzle than sizzle

The film premiered at Sundance, which has been the launching pad for several Araki pictures going all the way back to 1992’s The Living End. He has not released a film since 2014’s White Bird In A Blizzard, and, by his outre standards, I Want Your Sex is a fairly mainstream proposition, no doubt inviting comparisons to the somewhat similar Nicole Kidman/Harris Dickinson workplace erotic thriller Babygirl. With Wilde and Hoffman as his leads, joined by a supporting cast that includes red-hot pop star Charli XCX, this could be among Araki’s most commercial pictures.

Fresh out of college, Elliot (Hoffman) lands a job working for controversial, sexually explicit visual artist Erika Tracy (Wilde), who announces that he will be her new sexual muse. Elliot is unsure because he’s in a serious relationship with hard-working medical student Minerva (Charli XCX), but Erika is simply too sexually alluring to resist. Soon, he happily serves as her sub, agreeing to any humiliation she proposes he endure.

Araki has always explored how sex impacts so much of our lives — often in the context of LGBTQ+ relationships — but here focuses on straight characters who learn to navigate what does and doesn’t turn them on. Erika has already decided those things for herself, but the more uptight Elliot will get an education once he and his boss start sleeping together. Shackled to a passionless relationship with Minerva, who has little time for him because of her studies, Elliot feels liberated around Erika, finally getting to experience his wildest sexual fantasies with this adventurous woman.

Wilde clearly relishes playing such a vain, shallow huckster who insists that modern art is nothing but a scam. (Later, Erika recants that statement, assuring Elliot that she enjoys making outrageous claims in order to see if anyone is paying attention.) Costume designer Arianne Phillips dresses Erika in fabulous, albeit increasingly ludicrous outfits befitting someone who has made her name by leaving a bold impression. Wilde gleefully puts aside any hint of subtlety or emotional nuance to create a shamelessly brash boss who enjoys wrapping her impressionable underling around her finger.

But I Want Your Sex centres on Elliot, who conveniently ignores Erika’s warning that this arrangement is only about sex — love is not meant to enter the equation. Alas, this is where the screenplay, written by Karley Sciortino and Araki, starts to sputter. Although Hoffman capably portrays a sexually inexperienced young man wowed by the far more confident Erika, the film fails to develop the deeper feelings the character supposedly starts to have for his boss. Too quickly I Want Your Sex pivots from freewheeling sexual escapades — Elliot getting spanked, Elliot getting tied up — to him becoming obsessed and demanding to know where she sees their relationship going. That’s a familiar narrative trajectory for a film like this, but Araki seems to lose interest in the characters’ unequal power dynamic, which makes it difficult to track Elliot’s waffling between love and sexual addiction.

Not helping matters is that I Want Your Sex frames this love story as an extended flashback as Elliot, in the present, is sternly interrogated by two detectives (Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho) wanting answers regarding Erika’s whereabouts. Araki’s flirtation with thriller conventions proves distracting more than enticing, and the revelations are convoluted and unconvincing.

The picture also stumbles when trying to send up both the pretensions of the art world and the sexual hangups of straight people. That issue is especially disspiriting because it strands Elliot’s platonic best friend Apple (an endearingly shy but underused Chase Sui Wonders) in a potentially sexy and uproarious threesome sequence that ultimately goes nowhere. In this way and others, I Want Your Sex ends up being more fizzle than sizzle.