--- title: "I Want Your Sex (2026) review" description: "Horny cinema is back in 2026, and Gregg Araki showed up to personally beg the kids to log off and fuck." url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/i-want-your-sex/ --- ![A still from I Want Your Sex (2026)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/i-want-your-sex/backdrop.webp) # I Want Your Sex (2026) Aug 5, 2026 | 3 min read | Rated 4 out of 5 | Dir. Gregg Araki Horny cinema is back in 2026, and Gregg Araki showed up to personally beg the kids to log off and fuck. I’m so glad horny cinema is clawing its way back. It feels like the tide is finally turning on the puritan right-wing influencer brainworms that have Gen Z and Gen Alpha convinced sex is shameful, and Araki, 66 and completely unbothered, shows up to make the case in the bluntest terms possible: the kids need to loosen the fuck up, get out there, and have messy, embarrassing, consensual sex. The whole film is a plea to escape the panopticon of shame and guilt and isolation, to go make a fool of yourself on purpose as an act of self-expression. Working through the art world, Araki and co-writer Karley Sciortino argue that erotic sex is one of the last real truths we have left in an age of performance, capitalism, and constant surveillance. The smartest move is how it rhymes art and sex as twin modes of expression, and twin modes of domination. Olivia Wilde’s Erika Tracy makes vapid, meaningless provocation for money and clout, art with no inner truth, pure performance, and the film sets that against the possibility of sex that actually expresses something real. Performative fucking versus self-fulfilling eroticism, staged exactly like hollow art versus honest art. In this world both are weapons people use to dominate each other, and Araki keeps drawing the parallel until you can’t unsee it. It also does something I almost never see done honestly: it takes young men’s sexuality seriously without flattering it. Elliot’s whole cohort of men speaks in empty gooning language, marinating in a loneliness that curdles, at the edges, into sexual violence. These are people with nowhere near enough experience to understand their own bodies, minds, or desires, and the film lets them stay confused instead of pretending they’ve figured it out. As a bi guy, I felt seen by that fumbling. The Elliot and Apple scenes land hardest, two people circling an attraction neither has the language to name yet. Apple is written as repressed and quietly judgmental, the moral center Elliot keeps drifting away from, and watching them both grope toward something they can’t articulate is the truest thing in the movie. I’ll take messy, unresolved bi confusion onscreen over tidy nothing every single time. Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde are the glue, both giving genuinely naked, vulnerable performances, and I was proud of them for how far they went. Hoffman plays puppy-dog gormlessness so well, and he throws himself into humiliating, fully exposed sex scenes that can’t help but recall his father’s run of sexually frustrated, sexually confused men. He shows, better than almost anyone working, how sex can transform you and how it becomes a way to find out who you actually are. Wilde is the enigma, always performing, always dominating, impossible to read. Her Erika kept reminding me of Miranda Priestley, that same imperial indifference to her feeble assistants, right until one of them finally cracks something open in her. I still don’t fully understand what drives her, and chasing it is half the fun. Now my hot take. The film frames the whole thing as workplace sexual harassment, and the only part of the Erika and Elliot dynamic that actually bothered me was that she was his boss. He’s 23, an adult, and he affirms it over and over. It was absolutely an abusive relationship and he was also clearly getting something profound out of it, so my issue was the professional overstep, not the age. Past that, this isn’t my favorite Araki. After bingeing Nowhere and The Doom Generation to prep, it stings how flat this looks, shot like a TV show with a few inspired flashes and the neon-soaked shadows of his 90s work almost entirely gone. It really is his most mainstream movie to date. I don’t fully get the ending either. And it is wildly heavy-handed, and I do not care even a little. We’re living through the death of media literacy, and if you want to reach the kids, you have to say it right to their faces. This is Araki, sincere and earnest as hell, begging a frightened generation to go out, take the risk, make the mistake, and let somebody actually touch them. Log off. Fuck around. Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/i-want-your-sex/) ## Works on My Machine Get the next post by email. My newsletter covers homelab builds, AI tools and open source, and it goes out when I have something to say. It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. You'll get an email to confirm first. ![Joe Karlsson at his desk, chin on hand, with a microphone in front of him](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/about/collage/studio.webp) Joe Karlsson I write about my homelab, AI tools, databases, and the weird stuff I build on the side. [More about me →](https://www.joekarlsson.com/about/) [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/joekarlsson.com) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekarlsson/) | [GitHub](https://github.com/JoeKarlsson)