The following contains spoilers for I want your sex (2026), starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, and directed by Gregg Araki.
Elliot Bell is an aimless, unemployed 20-something man. He gets a job as an assistant to an eccentric artist, Erika Tracey, which leads to him being her lover and her submissive.
The film initially sets up a generational contrast. Elliot is the prototypical Gen Z (or Zed) male: ambition-less, timid, passive, and stuck in a protracted adolescence, or even childhood. His girlfriend, Minerva, is too busy studying for her MD for sex, and regards him with at best, boredom, and at worst, contempt. His female friend and roommate Apple is, like him, too cautious to act on their mutual attraction.
Erika is a (late) Gen X woman, an aggressively sexual, shock artist who wears fetish wear in her art studio. She brings Elliot (apparently the only heterosexual man in her employ) into her office and broaches the idea that he become her sexual partner. Erika gives Elliot a copy of a Harold Robbins novel, as if it were a relic of a bygone era. Elliot reads it in bed, then masturbates, thinking about her.
Elliot becomes the lover and submissive of Erika, in a series of scenes shot like David Lachapelle editorials. I should emphasize that there are no scenes of negotiation between them. Elliot does become infatuated with her, his passivity responding to her overwhelming presence and control. Erika does seem to have some emotional attachment to Elliot, but she’s also fickle.
The turning point comes when Erika calls up Elliot and demands a threesome. Elliot recruits his friend and roommate Apple. They both drink heavily before they go to Erika’s house. Somewhere along the line, this scene goes from comedic awkwardness to rape-y coercion. Though Apple has hinted at bi-curiosity before, Erika goes after her like a thirsty vampire, largely ignoring Elliot. Erika barks orders at them both, until Apple quits.
As a kinkster, this is when I lost all sympathy for Erika. Peel back her sexually liberated persona and she’s just an exploiter who doesn’t give a damn about anybody else’s desires or boundaries. Maybe Elliot is masochistic enough to handle it, but Apple is not. This ends Elliot’s long relationship with Apple, and leaves him nowhere to live.
I Want Your Sex is very stuck in the male gaze. The main spectacle is Olivia Wilde in a series of sexy outfits. Cooper Hoffman is not a subject of the gaze in the same way. (His chunky body makes him look like an overgrown child next to her.) The only time the movie shows male frontal nudity, is when Elliot sees the stud Minerva has been sleeping with behind his back. This sends our protagonist into total shock.
On the night of Erika’s big show, a critic’s comment sends Erika into a downward spiral. She wants to have a quickie with Elliot and sends him to wait in a stall in the ladies’ bathroom, but then gets distracted. When Elliot eventually comes out of the bathroom, he finds that Erika has used a video she took of one of their sessions in a video installation. In front of the media, Elliot dresses down Erika for violating his trust and privacy, which leads to her being “cancelled”, and him getting fired.
Against all common sense, Elliot goes back to Erika’s house, where she’s (apparently) drunk, and she gets him drunk. He blacks out, wakes up wearing a pink bra and panties, and finds Erika floating face down in her pool. He tries desperately to revive her, then calls the police, only to find that Erika has disappeared. This leads to the film’s framing device of Elliot telling his story to a pair of police detectives. They release him because they couldn’t find a body.
Finally, Erika turns up, alive. She explains to Elliot that her studio had been losing money and the failure of her show meant she couldn’t get out of debt. (Erika’s luxurious house with a pool and fancy car makes me suspect her money troubles are her own fault.) The only way (she said) she could not go broke was to fake her own death, and set up Elliot as a witness. This made art speculators buy all of her pieces immediately. (She did explain to the police that she’s not dead, so Elliot is off the hook for that.)
When Elliot says that she roofied him, making him think he might have killed her in a drugged blackout, which lead to him being interrogated by the police, she says that he’s now famous because of his relationship with her, and he can leverage that to get a career started. There’s a message for the modern age: “Fame, at any cost, no matter who you step on along the way.”
In a flash-forward to a year later, Elliot is a successful podcaster, interviewing Erika about her new book. Her hooks are sunk so deep into Elliot that he’s still drawn to her years later.
Pillion did a better job of exploring a dom-sub relationship from an inexperienced male submissive’s perspective. Collin is as awestruck by Ray as Elliot is of Erika, but Collin also sees Ray’s moments of affection and care. Erika may, in her way, like Elliot, but we never see her doing anything to help or support him. Elliot has to find out the hard way what kind of person she is.
The film wants to portray Erika as a complicated character, a charismatic bitch with a heart of gold. In practice, she’s pretty simple: she uses people, to advance her artistic career, to feed her ego, or just to screw with them. Her apology to Elliot is supposed to be her moment of vulnerability, but it looks more like her being even more manipulative.
Gregg Araki is the out gay male director and co-writer of this film, and the film takes an outsider’s perspective on heterosexual relationships. The directorial stand-in character is Zap, a gay man who is Elliot’s co-worker at the studio and later friend. Compared to Elliot and his failed-to-launch sexual and romantic life, Zap inhabits a completely different world of frictionless, man-on-man hookups, dates and weekend-long orgies. In his implied view, Elliot’s emotional vulnerability is quaint and naive; why not toughen up and separate physical and emotional intimacy entirely? This gap in expectations may be why Erika’s actions in the threesome scene don’t make her irredeemable in the eyes of this story.
There aren’t a lot of mainstream films about female dominant/male submissive relationships, and even fewer good ones. I Want Your Sex is not a romance; it’s a vulnerable person being taken advantage of. That the person taking the advantage is beautiful and female shouldn’t make a difference. It’s still statutory rape if it’s a teenage boy and an adult woman. Olivia Wilde, as Erika, has directed feminist films like Don’t Worry, Darling; you’d think she’s have a better understanding of sexual power dynamics than this.
