How to Have Sex review: An accomplished, devastating debut
Review Overview
Cast
8Complexity
8Control of tone
8David Farnor | On 27, Jan 2024
Director: Molly Manning Walker
Cast: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Laura Ambler, Enva Lewis
Certificate: 15
“Best! Holiday! Ever!” Those are the words chanted by Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), friends of Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) who go on a trip with her to Malia in Crete. Fresh out of GCSE exams and determined to party like grown-ups all summer, they embark on a classic rite of passage that cinema has portrayed many times. Unlike a lot of gross-out comedies that have gone before How to Have Sex, though, Molly Manning Walker’s debut is a frank and honest tale not only of discovery but also of friendship, consent and communication.
The girls waste no time in heading to the nearest bar on their jaunt, pausing only to snag a hotel room with a pool view and visit the beach. There’s a beautiful sense of freedom as they sing and dance in the shallow waves, which builds to the pulsing excitement of a neon-lit nightclub. At the helm, Molly Manning Walker has a formidable handle on tone, ramping things up through the frenetic drunken parties before slowing them down to near silence the morning after, as chatter and cold chips are the order of the day.
We eventually learn that Tara, the least experienced of the bunch, is a virgin – something that we hear from the sneering Skye. It’s no coincidence that she brings it up just as they encounter the people in the room across from theirs: Badger (Shaun Thomas), Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Paige (Laura Ambler). They’re also young, there to party and hoping for some memories to brag about to their friends when they return home. When the blonde-tattooed Badger takes a shine to Tara, Skye gets jealous of the attention and pushes Taz in the direction of the older, less friendly Paddy. Em, meanwhile, finds a connection with Paige.
Those dynamics shape what happens next, but are not directly responsible or the cause of those events. And it’s those muddy waters that Walker’s script bravely, importantly navigates. The initial adrenaline-fuelled energy begins to verge on sensory overload just as things turn darker for Tara, and Walker sensitively taps into an array of nuances around coercion and consent and the line between the two.
The cast are fantastic at capturing the intensity of peer pressure that lingers behind every group interaction, the fraught tensions that can turn friendships toxic just at the time when support is needed, the harmful way that men don’t call out other men for their inappropriate comments or inexcusable behaviour, the damage that not communicating about one’s needs, expectations or experiences can cause, but also the fact that, at such a young age, people don’t have the confidence or even vocabulary to do so.
Shaun Thomas as Badger is particularly good, as his flirtatious party boy emerges as a concerned friend almost by unspoken mutual agreement with Tara. Mia McKenna-Bruce, meanwhile, delivers a star-making turn that somehow takes the film from funny banter to concerned sadness. With just a change in her facial expression as she replays events in her head, we see her go on a journey that’s almost too complicated to express. In some ways, that feels like Molly Manning Walker’s point. Clocking in at a bracing 90 minutes, this is an accomplished, devastating feature debut.