Despite what the Gen Z kids often think online, cinema could always use more danger, more sex, and more movies willing to treat desire as something messy, ridiculous, liberating, and potentially lethal. Thankfully, Gregg Araki is back in the building. The official trailer has arrived for “I Want Your Sex,” Araki’s first feature in over a decade and a return to the queer, pop-blasted, sexually charged territory that helped define his place in American independent cinema.
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Written and directed by Araki, the film stars Cooper Hoffman (“Licorice Pizza”) as Elliot, a fresh-faced young man who lands a job with renowned artist, icon, and provocateur Erika Tracy, played by Olivia Wilde. What begins as a dream gig quickly becomes something stranger, kinkier, and much more dangerous after Erika taps him to become her sexual muse.
Per the official synopsis, Elliot soon finds himself pulled into “a world of sex, obsession, power, betrayal and murder,” which sounds about right for an Araki movie. From “The Doom Generation” and “Nowhere” to “Mysterious Skin,” “Kaboom,” and the cult MTV series “Now Apocalypse,” Araki has spent decades collapsing queer desire, apocalypse anxiety, teen alienation, pop detritus, and sexual chaos into his own unruly cinematic language. Even when the results are uneven, his movies rarely confuse good taste for vitality.
That alone makes “I Want Your Sex” feel like a welcome provocation in a studio culture often terrified of anything that cannot be sanded into IP, lore, or four-quadrant palatability. Araki’s work has never been shy about kink, lust, obsession, or the erotic absurdity of power dynamics, and this one appears to lean directly into that lineage: artist and muse, boss and employee, fantasy and exploitation, sex-positive freedom, and the creeping suspicion that someone is probably lying.
The film premiered earlier this year at Sundance, where The Playlist’s review singled out its leads as the real reason to watch, writing that Wilde and Hoffman “make having ‘Sex’ worth it.” That may be the central appeal here, too. Hoffman has been steadily moving away from any easy “son of” framing, while Wilde has always had a sharper, more volatile screen presence than many of her mainstream roles have allowed. Put them inside Araki’s world of erotic gamesmanship, art-world satire, and murder-mystery delirium, and you at least have something that sounds alive.
The stacked cast also includes Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Margaret Cho, and Johnny Knoxville, which gives the film the kind of chaotic party-movie energy Araki has long weaponized. Whether “I Want Your Sex” fully recaptures the shockwave of his earlier work is almost beside the point; a new Araki film built around queer cinema, kink, sex, power, and bad decisions already feels like an antidote to a lot of contemporary movie timidity.
“I Want Your Sex” opens in theaters from Magnolia Pictures. Watch the official trailer below.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
