REVIEW: How to Have Sex [2023]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 91 minutes
Release Date: November 3rd, 2023 (UK) / February 2nd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Molly Manning Walker
Writer(s): Molly Manning Walker

Chips are technically vegetables, aren’t they?

The moment from Molly Manning Walker’s excellent feature debut How to Have Sex that I can’t get out of my head is the one where Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) hears Em (Enva Lewis) from behind a locked door saying she loves her. In a perfect world, Tara would ask her friend to come in and protect her. But this isn’t a perfect world. This is a world where everyone believes Tara doesn’t need protection. A world where they are actually jealous of her for what they think is happening and thus prove too preoccupied to find out if the opposite is true.

So, Tara attempts to make her friend understand without overtly saying anything that might risk angering the man with his arms around her in that locked room. She reciprocates the love and asks her, “Are you okay?” Em answers, “Yes.” because the sexual awakening she’s experienced this trip was consensual. It was everything she dreamt it could be. Then we wait for Em to return the favor regardless of appearances or assumptions. Just ask Tara if she’s okay too. Maybe she’ll answer, “No.” Maybe she won’t. We’ll never know because those words don’t come.

That’s not on Em. Walker isn’t blaming Tara’s friends for staying silent despite their knowing looks that something isn’t right. Walker isn’t blaming Tara either for not quite being able to reconcile what happened to her against what everyone else thinks. The blame lies squarely on the abuser and on society at-large for fostering the climate of sex-fueled peer pressure that allows for such abuse to occur as often as it does with built-in victim-blaming infrastructure. Just search comments from men who have watched this film and see how many freely admit their own monstrousness by coming to his defense with claims he did nothing wrong.

Because, to them, this isn’t “rape” as they define it. That’s why Walker’s film is so important in its authentic depiction of rape as it must be defined. It should be clear as day simply by looking into Tara’s eyes. At her body language. At her micro-expressions of revulsion and recoil. McKenna-Bruce delivers a performance that will break your heart—especially after it happens and she realizes she cannot go back to her hotel room because he might be there and her friends might not understand. She finds another club and new friends instead, vacillating between happy and numb as the incident replays itself throughout every part of her body.

Expressing that duality isn’t easy. Walker and McKenna-Bruce are expertly showing the difference between desire and consent. Yes, Tara wants to lose her virginity. Her goal on this vacation, like Em and Skye (Lara Peake), is to have as much sex as possible. But that doesn’t give permission to anyone and everyone she meets. How Tara acts in the first thirty minutes should not have any bearing on what happens to her during the next hour. Because despite the drinking and dancing and flirting, she makes her intentions with Badger (Shaun Thomas) known. It’s the chaos of hedonism throwing a wrench in those plans that erases the lines of decency and morality for those arriving to pounce.

Thomas demands mention for a devastating performance too. He and Lewis are similar in that Badger and Em are the two people who honestly care about Tara beyond superficiality (Skye loves her friend, but jealousy drives that car). The looks Thomas and Lewis give upon seeing McKenna-Bruce in distress are pained enough to make us hope they’ll intervene. Life just doesn’t always work out that way. Life causes them to question what they’re seeing and to weigh being right against the personal consequences of being wrong.

As the final moment proves, however, the only action Tara truly needs from them is an acknowledgment that they have her back and believe what happened. That they won’t leave her alone this time. Not again.