I Want Your Sex: Araki's Uncertain Return

Gregg Araki hasn’t made a feature in twelve years. I Want Your Sex announces itself as deliberately shocking, then spends ninety minutes deciding whether to actually go through with it. The film opens well: Olivia Wilde plays Erika Tracy, a 23-year-old who becomes the sexual muse for an aging provocateur. It’s the kind of setup that should crackle. Instead, Araki settles for gesturing toward scandal.

The central relationship between Wilde’s Erika and Cooper Hoffman’s Elliot lacks real weight. Hoffman carries the material—he’s playing a man whose artistic hunger has become something hollow—but the script doesn’t match his performance. Araki co-wrote with podcaster Karley Sciortino, and their screenplay treats kink and power dynamics as ideas rather than experiences. Nothing sits long enough to hurt.

Tucker Korte’s cinematography is clean and clinical. For a film this explicitly about desire, it’s surprisingly cold. That could be intentional—maybe the distance is the point. Or maybe Araki just didn’t want to commit. The editing keeps things moving fast. Diggs, Chase Sui Wonders, and Charli XCX drift through the art world scenes finding moments the script doesn’t give them. Diggs is particularly good at making something feel real.

James Clements’ score stays neutral. Neither endorsing nor condemning. It’s the film in miniature: so afraid of being wrong that it refuses to be anything.

What’s strange about I Want Your Sex is how it explains its own failure. It wants to provoke without actually provoking. It gestures at moral confusion while keeping everything safe. Magnolia Pictures paid seven figures for it. That says something about what the marketplace thinks it can sell.

Araki clearly still has ideas about desire and power. This film just doesn’t execute them. I Want Your Sex is smart enough to make you think, not bold enough to make you uncomfortable. For a film about desire, that’s a problem.