The Review: ‘I Want Your Sex’ – Olivia Wilde Owns Her Wildest Year Yet

August 15, 2026

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featuring @lunapalacecinemas @oliviawilde @charli_xcx

Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is exactly the kind of movie you might expect from the filmmaker behind The Doom Generation and Kaboom: provocative, colourful, deliberately outrageous and more than a little ridiculous. After more than a decade away from feature filmmaking, Araki returns with a kinky comedy-thriller that mixes sex, power, obsession, art and murder into a wonderfully messy 90-minute package.

At the centre of it all is Cooper Hoffman as Elliot, a directionless young man who lands a job working for Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a notorious artist and provocateur. What begins as an exciting career opportunity quickly becomes something considerably more complicated when Erika chooses Elliot as her sexual muse. Suddenly, the boundaries between employee and employer, fantasy and reality, and pleasure and manipulation become increasingly blurred.

And then there’s Olivia Wilde, who is having a hell of a year.

Between I Want Your Sex and The Invite, Wilde has managed to put sexuality, vulnerability and complicated relationships at the centre of two very different films, while delivering performances that remind you just how effortlessly magnetic she can be. In I Want Your Sex, she completely understands the assignment. Erika is larger than life, unpredictable, intimidating and endlessly watchable, and Wilde embraces every ridiculous inch of the character. She brings an almost classic Hollywood-star quality to the role while simultaneously sending it up.

Hoffman makes for an entertaining counterbalance. Elliot is deliberately awkward and inexperienced, and his gradual descent into Erika’s world gives the film much of its comedic energy. Their dynamic also allows Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino to play around with ideas about generational attitudes toward sex, masculinity, consent and the increasingly complicated relationship young people have with intimacy.

The film certainly isn’t subtle about any of this. Araki throws everything at the screen: BDSM, outrageous costumes, bizarre art-world personalities, colourful production design and plenty of deliberately absurd humour. At its best, that excess is what makes I Want Your Sex so much fun. It feels unapologetically like a movie made by someone who simply wants to have fun with the possibilities of sex and cinema rather than treat either subject with solemnity.

That said, the film doesn’t always know what to do with all of its ideas. The story eventually becomes somewhat conventional, particularly once the murder-mystery elements take over. Some of the more provocative material feels like it is there primarily for shock value, while the narrative occasionally struggles to maintain the momentum of its first half. The third act in particular feels rushed, with the film trying to wrap up several increasingly chaotic plot threads before the credits roll.

There are also moments when the comedy doesn’t land as strongly as Araki clearly hopes it will. But even when I Want Your Sex misses, there is something admirable about how completely committed it is to its own strange sensibilities. This is not a film interested in behaving itself.

Ultimately, I Want Your Sex is an entertaining, occasionally hilarious and frequently bizarre return for Araki. It doesn’t quite have the consistency or narrative punch to make it a great film, but its energy, visual style and terrific central performance from Wilde make it difficult to dismiss. And if nothing else, it confirms something that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: 2026 is definitely Olivia Wilde’s year.