Rent How to Have Sex (2023)

Don't waste a rental - How to Have Sex review by SKC

Obnoxious entitled girls on holiday. Nothing else to say. Even the great actor Samuel Bottomley could not save this. Switched off after a few minutes and a fast search to see if it went anywhere, it didn't. It reminded me why I always book a holiday where western Europeans don't go. Vile.

Interesting Coming Of Age Drama - How to Have Sex review by GI

An authentic and quite vibrant coming-of-age drama that delves deep and very effectively into the dilemma of young women regarding their first sexual encounter and what it means. The title is clever in that it is essentially a question of what sex is about and what it's effects are combined with the elements that make up the process towards a sexual encounter ie alcohol, peer pressure, the opposite sex. This is played out here in a narrative that also acts as a warning. Three young girls awaiting their A-Level results are on a summer holiday together, a sort of wild adventure, to a resort in Crete. One of them, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), is looking for her first sexual liaison prompted by her two more experienced friends. As they embark on the wild nightlife of drink and drugs Tara strikes up a friendship with a boy in the next hotel room. But they drift into that difficult area of friends making it uncomfortable, in their naivety, to make the move into romance. But when Tara witnesses him getting a blowjob on a night club stage in front of a cheering crowd she is disgusted and inadvertently falls into the arms of his friend who fucks her. Tara's emotions after the experience are at the heart of this film, the ambiguity of the encounter highlights the difficulty of this rite of passage. An unsentimental look at young relationships wrapped around an arguably clichéd depiction of modern young people over indulging to the point of recklessness but a powerful film all the same

Deliberate shock title, awful film, avoid unless a teenage girl - How to Have Sex review by PV

A gimmicky CHANNEL-5-style shock title to get the target audience - teen girls - to watch.

Unless you are an easily-impressed sex-curious teenage girl, do not bother.

Trash

A sobering insight into the pressures facing our teenagers - How to Have Sex review by Darius

An insight into what an annual holiday in one of the most popular resorts consists of for millions of our young people. Made me less likely than ever to consider a visit to Malia or anywhere similar (not that I'm in the target age range for such resorts!). A few questions - would the airline/hotel/package company really allow three unaccompanied 16-year-olds to travel unaccompanied? Would they not require at least one of them to be over 18? And what were the parents thinking of allowing them to do this? And is alcohol really so easily available in these resorts for under-18s? The film certainly opens up debate about what constitutes consent for sex when in a semi-conscious state. Should be required viewing for kids considering such holidays - and their parents.

Ambitious tale of teenage friendship and the vagaries of sexual consent - How to Have Sex review by PD

Molly Manning Walker’s ambitious feature attempts a look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships combined with a rather didactic story about the vagaries of consent, with the result that it's much better at the former than the latter. Best friends Tara, Em, and Skye scream “Best! Holiday! Ever!” at each other during a taxi ride from the airport, oblivious to the dangers of deciding that in advance; they’ve also pre-determined that Tara — the trio’s last remaining virgin — will “get laid” by the time they go home, which proves to be another fraught case of putting the cart before the horse. Tara seems on board with the plan, and it’s not as if it’ll be hard to find a willing partner given her good looks and a ultra-hedonistic Malia beach club; alas, however, there’s no guarantee that any of Tara’s potential suitors know how to have sex any better than she does. And of course the odds are they won’t even care — not when so many of these people have been socialised to think of sex as a consecration of their own self-worth; that this is a culture which collectively diminishes notions of consent in the rush to 'experience' is an obvious target.

The film is at its best during its first half, when the thrust of Walker’s attention is focused on the nuances of Tara’s friendship with Skye and Em. As played by the excellent Mia McKenna Bruce, Tara is a multi-dimensional lead: street smart, she is brash and bull-headed in a way that disguises her relative innocence — as well as her private fear that the GCSE results will put her on a very different path than her besties. The pressure Tara feels to join the club and have sex is even more intense now that she feels like even the smallest fissure between she and her friends might fracture them apart forever, and it doesn’t help that Tara — like so many of the people she meets in Malia — seems privately convinced that everyone else is having more fun than she is. Maybe if she has another bathtub-sized drink everything will fall into place. Maybe if she finally gets laid she’ll be able to postpone her actual loss of innocence: the crushing realisation that her life may not live up to the dreams she once had for it.

The other two members of the fraternity are either too cynical or not cynical enough. Em is a rather underwritten sweetheart who’s too busy snogging her lesbian crush to notice what Tara is going through, while Skye is an insecure bully whose appetite for deep-fried cigarettes is only matched by her need to undercut Tara at every opportunity. She’s the kind of girl who only seems interested in fucking the guys her friends like, so when Tara hits it off with the bleach-blond ('Badger') who’s staying in the next room over, it’s only a matter of time before Skye casually tells him that Tara has never had sex before. Badger's good-hearted nature in this context is refreshing; by contrast, all the booze in the world can’t hide the fact that his best mate Paddy is, as Badger says much later, an absolute “nightmare of a guy.” Unfortunately, all these characters are incongruously one-dimensional for a film so attuned to the grey areas of sexual assault.

At its best, the film captures the kinds of unspoken rituals that occur within groups of excitable youth, the way certain people hover around each other and the way others can just swoop in, the paroxysms of longing and jealousy and spite and shame that are the lingua franca of being a teenager. It also captures the ways that such interactions can quickly become poisoned and dangerous. Even during an overwrought third act, it never loses sight of what these characters are willing to overlook, or why. It all ends on a soberingly painful note as Tara, at long last, sees herself with a clarity that she’ll be able to keep forever — a valuable souvenir rescued from a holiday she'll never forget.