OVERVIEW
I Want Your Sex is a raunchy and unruly comedy thriller in which Cooper Hoffman plays Elliot, a fresh-faced, just-out-of-college assistant who lands a job with Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), a famous provocateur and sexually explicit visual artist. Elliot thinks he has scored a dream gig until Erika taps him as her sexual muse, pulling him into a dom-sub dynamic that escalates into obsession and power games.
BACKGROUND
After spending the last 12 years mostly in television, occasionally directing episodes of mainstream series, Gregg Araki returns to features for the first time since 2014 with I Want Your Sex. Long associated with provocative stories about youth and desire, Araki uses this film to update his approach for a 2026 audience, swapping in current anxieties about sex, consent language, and power dynamics. The premise reportedly started as a playful Fifty Shades of Grey riff, but Araki reshapes it into a Gen Z contradiction: always talking, always posting, and still hesitant when real intimacy shows up.
EXECUTION
For a while, I Want Your Sex delivers exactly what its title and logline promise. It is fast, raunchy, and funnier than it has any right to be. It gets a lot of mileage out of the unconventional dynamic between Cooper Hoffman’s neurotic Elliot and Olivia Wilde’s unapologetic, domineering Erika. Both actors commit hard. Wilde in particular plays Erika with a fearless confidence, and the movie feels alive whenever she is on screen pushing the scene one step further.
Araki also sets the first half up in a smart way. A present day framing device, then two jumps back for “the first time” moments, lets the film land its shocks in waves, and it keeps the escalation feeling fresh for a good amount of time. As the central relationship gets more toxic and favors get more absurd, Elliot’s outside life starts collapsing, and the comedy keeps coming from the contrast between how intense their private world is and it looks from the outside.
The best stretch is when the film is simply building into this relationship and mining it for jokes, like Erika casually pushing Elliot’s sexual boundaries, her reaction to Elliot describing his encounter with her European friend, or the constant reactions of Elliot’s roommate and work colleague.
The turning point comes around the threesome scene, which strains the central relationship in a way the movie does not quite know how to develop. From there, it starts walking in circles. Elliot keeps repeating variations of “Why are you doing this?” and “Are you insane?” until it becomes tiresome, and the fun slowly drains out without being replaced by much insight into either character.
It ends up sharing a lot with 2025’s Pillion. Both films find humor in explicit, shocking portrayals of modern relationships, then settle into something frustratingly conventional once the initial high wears off. I Want Your Sex keeps hinting at interesting questions, but it either backs away or simplifies them. Elliot’s scenes with the detectives make that clear when he admits his motivation basically comes down to Erika being hot, for example.
Erika is still the more interesting character, yet the film never sees her beyond a plot device. We get plenty of surface: the costumes, the confidence, the art talk, the attention-grabbing provocations. But we get very little about what compels her, what she gets out of repeating the cycle, or how it all ties to her decreasing quality in her art.
Even so, the craft around that empty core is strong. The production design is eye-catching, especially in Erika’s office, where objects and colors compete for attention in a way that almost swallows Elliot whole. He is often framed in pale, plain clothes, like a light blue shirt, which serves as a visual representation of how out of place he is in her world.
AFTERTASTE
If you’re looking solely for raunchy laughs, I Want Your Sex delivers, largely because Wilde and Hoffman are willing to push the material far, and because the first half keeps the jokes coming at a great pace. But without a clear heart, the second half becomes repetitive and strangely dull, leaving one wondering whether it had the chance to be more insightful about this dynamic, but never fully goes there.