How to Have Sex

You have to feel sorry for places like the town of Malia in Crete. Like Ibiza and Ayia Napa, these holiday destinations have become where British teens head to pass as twentysomethings to get drunk and laid. That’s what’s happening with virgin Tara (McKenna-Bruce) and her friends, lascivious Skye (Peake) and Em (Lewis), who fills the role of the sensible one in the trio. And it’s happening with Badger (Bottomley) and Paddy (Thomas), the tatted and horned-up lads with their lesbian friend (Ambler) in the hotel room next door at the party central hotel where the girls conned their way into a pool view. Cheap flights, cheap booze, shared rooms, clubs where boys and girls are thrust at and into each other. It’s a place where the cold nightmare of sexual assault is all too commonplace, while consent becomes clouded by the ambiguity of drunken yeses.

After the inexplicable roars of applause for the ham-fisted Promising Young Woman, seeing first-time feature director Molly Manning Walker treat similar issues with so much more empathy and nuance makes How to Have Sex a disturbing if welcome addition to the conversation. She fits right into the great lineage of British social realist filmmakers, of Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Ken Loach: detached enough to observe yet close enough to feel hearts rent by oblivious friends and grabby boys. She understands the complexity bearing witness but not feeling empowered to intervene, of knowing that the “r” word can never be said, and depending on the hope that what happens on Malia stays on Malia. Much of that is personified in a startling performance by McKena-Bruce as the diminutive Tara, the little sister of the trio whose internalized trauma starts to split her off from her friends. But the issues find a suitably stuttering voice in Bottomley as Badger, the tattooed loudmouth who proves that old adage about books and covers.

Writer/director Walker’s empathetic eye and cool grasp of this feverish party and its inevitable crash into remorse has been suitably lauded since it picked up the 2023 Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes (it wrapped up its festival run at Sundance last week before arriving in theatres). However, there’s a strange flaw in her off-puttingly well-executed and suitably disturbing depiction of this blue-collar bacchanalian horror show. The three young women are 16 trying to pass as older (there’s even a quick conversation about whether they can convince bartenders they’re 20 or 18, as if that matters as the bass thumps and the ouzo splashes. Yet casting three actresses in their mid-20s somehow blunts, while never quite deadening, the impact. Relying on McKena-Bruce’s short stature and cherubic face to imply teenhood never quite works, even as Walker attempts to use her age to imply yet more questions of consent. If Paddy and Badger knew they were 16, she implicitly asks, how would their behavior differ? That such questions are left to the audience’s own pondering stops this from ever laboring under movie-of-the-week mundanity and allows How to Have Sex to remain unnervingly astute.