Review: How to Have Sex

Director:  Molly Manning Walker

Stars:  Mia McKenna-Bruce, Enva Lewis, Lara Peake

For Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), a post-exams clubbing holiday to Greece is what dreams are made of; an opportunity to cast-off the realities of being a teenager in working class Southern England and to instead bask in the sex fantasies and binge-drinking excesses made aspirational by their peers and an endless feed of trash reality TV shows. The three girls – barely more than children – rush toward adulthood unsupervised. And while the opening of their freewheeling holiday plays like a British Spring Breakers, it quickly deteriorates into a hellish reimagining of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade if everything had gone considerably worse for Kayla in the back of that SUV.

A rights-of-passage in some circles, the Mediterranean clubbing holiday is an industry unto itself, one sustained on a number of spurious ideologies that are investigated here by Molly Manning Walker in her directorial debut. In certain respects How to Have Sex updates some of the original exploitation films, which terrorised conservative moviegoers with depictions of tearaway teens. Titles like High School Hellcats or, in the UK, Beat Girl frightened parents with the horrors of their little’uns growing up too fast. From it’s very title, How to Have Sex leans into this lineage, which often masqueraded as public information films.

Manning Walker’s intention, however, is a shade more modern. While How to Have Sex is scary (it’s this introverted writer’s idea of hell-on-earth), she strives to find a balance between exploring the excesses of this subculture and exposing the dangerous sexual politics that it perpetuates in an effort to open up a dialogue within her audience.

Of the central trio, our chief concern is Tara, a virgin worried about her GCSE results, who has the idea that losing her innocence on this holiday will be a fun adventure. Quickly, however, Manning Walker removes the veneer of fantasy, cataloguing awkward and/or depressing flirtations that lack any kind of chemistry as Tara discovers reality is a lot more complicated. The emotional complexity of sex is what is discovered in Greece, along with some far darker realities thanks to the mindset of the visiting boys.

Tara and her friends get chatting with the lads in the adjoining villa. And while ‘Badger’ (Shaun Thomas) is oafishly goofy, his friend Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) has a quietly predatory vibe that bares itself out. Manning Walker plays a couple of mid-film tricks with chronology so that she can withhold information about a defining night for Tara, only to piecemeal replay the events as Tara relives them.

Not wanting to rock the boat or disrupt the hedonistic vibe of the herd, Tara keeps quiet about the extent of her entanglement with Paddy, in the process throwing herself into further danger from a young man who has normalised his own selfish behaviour. It is this urge to maintain a status quo that Manning Walker interrogates, presenting us a victim of sexual violence with complex reasons for not coming forward. We understand Tara’s reticence, born of a mix of peer pressure, anxiety over the future and her own shattered dreams of what sex should be.

The drinking games that litter the pool parties further the idea of sex as a simplistic and transactional part of resort culture. From the innuendo of beer can fellatio to more explicit activities later into the night, there’s a persistent subservience to the games that places the girls beneath the boys both physically and psychologically. Manning Walker draws connections between these promotions and the attitudes toward sex prowling the devastated local streets.

McKenna-Bruce is a pint-sized revelation as Tara, convincingly playing the wide-eyed naivety of a teenage girl going through a mill of emotions having prepared only for joy. Favourable comparisons to Florence Pugh hold water. Manning Walker’s ensemble of young players all impress (Bottomley has the chills of Barry Keoghan minus any of the charm; that’s a good thing here), but How to Have Sex rests on the shoulders of McKenna-Bruce and she carries it. This ought to be her launchpad.

Playing like the repugnant dance remix to Charlotte Wells’ A-side Aftersun, this is a coming-of-age movie of a different stripe and tempo. It shies from outright hectoring the viewer but the intent is clearly to provoke young women in particular into changing their approach to binge-drinking wild-outs but more importantly into voicing their stories. A late confessional scene feels both wonderfully positive and depressingly unlikely. A halcyon capper that provides the audience with some dose of comfort but likely rarely happens.

One hopes a similar line of recognition will land in the hearts of the young male viewers who, seeing Tara’s emotional fallout, might question their own behaviours and the behaviours of their mates. One of the most tantalising and frustrating aspects of the film is Badger’s tight-lipped understanding of what Paddy is, but his inability to properly articulate this with Tara. That breakdown in communication matters as much as any other itemised here.