While waiting for Lido’s Cheap Tuesday matinee showing of Gregg Araki’s newest film, I Want Your Sex, my friend and I noticed the person in the frontmost occupied row, in plain sight of every other cool cinephile behind him, scrolling on Hinge. How apt, we mused, given the film we were about to see. 

As a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement of the ‘90s, Araki’s work is known for essentialising the angst, horniness, and sense of meaningless felt by the queer youngsters of his generation. In I Want Your Sex, Araki refocusses on a new generation’s problème du jour: Gen Z’s so-called “sex recession”.

The film opens with Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), bloodied and dressed in pink frilly lingerie, pulling the body of renegade artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) from her mansion’s pool. Elliot is then interrogated by police about the leadup to the night’s event; the bulk of the film’s narrative—starting during Elliot’s first week working for Erika, in which she asks him “You wouldn’t get weird then…if we fucked”—is told in flashbacks prompted by the interview. 

Despite the dramatic (and dramatically sexual) start to the movie, Elliot is soon characterised as a typically bland early 20-something. He’s meek, afraid of conflict and sexually unsatisfied—his studious girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX—no comment), complains against Elliot’s advances that “we just had sex eleven days ago.” Meanwhile, Erika is expanding Cooper’s sexual horizons with hyperbolically kinky sex, though this remains emotionless, of course—it’s “purely a sex thing”, as Erika has to remind Elliot.

I Want Your Sex is, first and foremost, a bit of fun. The film oozes Araki’s trademarks: shoegaze over sex scenes, personal/sexual awakening, bright colours and the occasional surreal sequence. Fans of his earlier work won’t be disappointed. There are also several laugh-out-loud moments—the attempted (and, necessarily, failed) threesome was notably hilarious. Nonetheless, I left frustrated by Araki's flattening of the Gen Z experience, which manifested in weak dialogue and half-baked messaging. 

The film makes clear that Araki thinks our generation needs saving from our miserable sexless existence where we're too woke and terrified to even make eye contact with each other (unless we're gay cis men, in which case we're sluts—the one openly gay character is hypersexual, but in a woke and non-homophobic way, apparently.). The character of Erika Tracy represents this misconception, with Araki saying in an interview that “a lot of her views on sex, sexuality, and art are very much my views… She speaks for me a lot.” The unfortunate result of this is boringly moralising dialogue where Erika is literally quoting statistics about Gen Z’s sex lives. Erika could have been such an interesting character—arrogant, narcissistic, intellectual and sexual—but she was unfortunately limited by her role as Araki’s mouthpiece. 

But I’m frustrated about this for more than just the ill consequences on character and dialogue. I think Gen Z is more sexually agentive than Araki is giving us credit for, and we use this agency to refute the normative sexual narratives laid out by previous generations. It reminds me of John Cameron Mitchell, director of one of my all-time favourite queer films, Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), writing for the New York Times in 2025 that he’d tell college students “to stop cancelling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it.” This well-intended but glibly unhelpful advice is a result of a root misdiagnosis: Cameron Mitchell writes that “the simple act of looking into someone else’s eyes [provoking] anxiety” is the reason behind our generation’s sexual reticence. In I Want Your Sex, it seems like Araki, I mean Erika, believes the same thing.

To be clear, I do understand (and share!) older generations’ concern over Gen Z's “sex recession”. Sex is important for self-knowledge, regarding your body, its boundaries and its pleasures. Sex is political, especially queer sex, and especially in a post-Roe v. Wade society. But to simply implore us to just put our phones down and get laid is patently unhelpful. And not just because we can’t all have Olivia Wilde-like MILF enter our lives and sexually dominate us! It’s a glib solution to a cultural shift that Araki and others fundamentally misunderstand. Remember that cinemagoer performatively scrolling on Hinge before the movie started? We have new ways of connecting with people, new norms for navigating dating and sex, and I don’t think Araki quite understands them.

It’s worth noting here that Jane Schoenbrun’s new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has similar goals of encouraging Gen Z to have more (and better) sex. Camp Miasma portrays this message through a structurally similar relationship to Erika and Elliot’s: Gillian Anderson’s MILF-coded character Billy sexually leads Hannah Einbinder’s nubile Kris. But Camp Miasma’s sex scenes are thoughtful, laden with compassion, fantasy, agency, reclamation and trust. Comparatively, I Want Your Sex brute forces the point in a way that is categorically unhelpful and rests on Araki's shallow understanding of the reasons behind gen Z's alleged sexual paucity. 

Araki knows he risks being didactic in the movie, so he ensures there are repercussions for Elliot—his relationship with Erika sets his life on a downward spiral, culminating in the movie’s opening Sunset Boulevardparallel. This is intended to make the movie at least somewhat dialogic: Erika’s character espouses the pro-crazy sex position, and the narrative itself shows the consequences of this when taken too far. But I’m not convinced by this, partly because the various steps on Elliot’s downward descent were a result not of his sexual exploration and awakening, but of Erika’s manipulation. Some of them also seem easily resolvable, and the fact that the film refused to engage with the very obvious path to resolution (apology, communication) made these lows feel a little too contrived.

Araki has said, “I want to present these themes and ideas in terms of sex and sexuality…I want to open a conversation.” Although I was disappointed by the politics of the movie, it certainly got me thinking and talking, enough to write a review for Farrago. I Want Your Sex is best understood as a fun movie imbued with Araki’s signature style, just without the incisive substance you might expect from him.