Review: ‘I Want Your Sex’ wants Gen Z to have a messy affair with their boss
2026 / Dir. Gregg Araki / 2026 Chicago Critics Film Festival
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: Doom Generation, if Licorice Pizza had been about a sleazy BDSM relationship, destroying your life to satisfy the cruel whims of capitalist desire.
After taking a hiatus from feature directing in favor of working in television, including his criminally underseen Now Apocalypse, ‘90s New Queer Cinema provocateur Gregg Araki is back to pervert audiences with an all-star cast in tow.
Cooper Hoffman is Eliot, playing a horny, aimless post-grad (basically the character James Duval would have played in classic Araki films like Nowhere) who ends up becoming the submissive of his pop-art provocateur boss, Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). Wilde and Hoffman are game for many outrageous BDSM scenes that are more kinky, goofy fun than sexy, with Wilde as a real standout for her portrayal of a woman who is every modern art stereotype pushed to the max. Hoffman plays a version of the earnest young man he debuted in Licorice Pizza, but gets points for a risky, physical performance that most up-and-coming actors wouldn’t want to touch with a 10-foot dildo. Likewise, the rest of the cast don’t get a ton to do, but Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs, and even Charli XCX (as Eliot’s uptight medical student girlfriend) all get scene-stealing moments.
The basic thesis of I Want Your Sex—that Gen Z is statistically not having much sex and that undergoing messy sexual exploration should be a formative experience—doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Still, Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino (Slutever) is a fun, fast-paced crowd pleaser that makes for a great midnight movie if you don’t think too hard about it. Hopefully, this also marks an ongoing return for Araki, and I’d love to see him bring back the lo-fi strangeness he was known for that is only hinted at in this one.