I WANT YOUR SEX
Directed by: Gregg Araki
Written by: Karley Sciortino & Gregg Araki
Stars: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho, Roxane Mesquida, Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs
(Black Bear: 90mins. UK cert 18 opens Aug 28)

To have encountered, in these troubled times, even one mainstream-orientated, fetish/BDSM-themed movie worth the price of a bag of popcorn might be regarded in kink circles as quite the luxury.

So to be treated in 2026 to two such works — gay biker romance Pillion and, just released in the UK, Gregg Araki’s comedy-thriller I Want Your Sex — might lead some kinksters to conclude that we’re being really spoilt.

Queer cinema hero Araki, who made his directorial debut with Three Bewildered People in the Night in 1987, and won wide acclaim with his 2004 feature Mysterious Skin, took a 12-year break from filmmaking after 2014’s White Bird in a Blizzard, finally resurfacing with the premiere of I Want Your Sex at January’s Sundance Film Festival.

Other than the pivotal roles played in both by dom-sub relationships and the fact that both could be called comedies with a message, these two films have little in common. But also, perhaps surprisingly for Araki fans, I Want Your Sex is about a broadly ‘straight’ (ie male-female) kink relationship, which seems to have bemused some reviewers.

In fact it’s closer in many ways to Secretary, the 2003 film about the intense kinky affair

But this is not a porn movie, and Araki has been careful not to venture into anatomically explicit visual territory. The nearest we see to real penises are dildos (see above), and the nearest to a real vagina is the massive bubblegum vulva on a wall in Erika’s studio (of which more later, you’ll be pleased to hear).

And if poking the right-wing rage-beast were really the distributor’s worry, it would not have been wise to include the film’s racy poster artwork in the press pack, would it?

So the more likely explanation seemed to be that they wanted to provide just enough of a tease to encourage audiences to go and see the movie to discover for themselves the full panoply of treats it promised within.

The poster art (shown at the top of this article sans text) surely has the potential to achieve that effect among those of a pervier disposition, as it features latex-catsuited Wilde brandishing a flogger while sitting astride bondage-harness-clad Hoffman, who is spread supine on a bed.

It reminds me stylistically of the kind of publicity images that promoted some of Pedro Almodóvar’s early movies — and those certainly did the trick for me. Even the film’s title has echoes of Almodóvar about it.

Seated, as I was in early August, in the opulent air-conditioned comfort of a room in the basement of the Soho Hotel, where the UK Press screening of I Want Your Sex had just started, it quickly became evident that Araki was intent on throwing in cheeky nods to various earlier movies — although I’m not sure all of this audience got the references.