Compelling and occasionally chilling coming-of-age tale
Watching this captivating, compelling – and occasionally chilling – UK coming-of-age tale initially unfold you’d be forgiven for thinking it is the UK’s answer to the controversial Spring Breakers crossed with The Inbetweeners Movie.
It even shares its location with the big-screen spin-off of the beloved late noughties sitcom – Malia, Crete.
However, strip away the cinema vérité footage of lads and ladettes drinking, dancing and flirting and cinematographer (she lensed last year’s almost equally brilliant UK drama Scrapper) and Molly Manning Walker’s writing and directorial debut is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale of peer pressure and public and private humiliation, that also acts as a thought-provoking and educational look at what constitutes consent. Sixteenyear-olds Tara (Vampire Academy’s Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Brave New World’s Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis) are determined to have the summer holiday of their young lives.
Delighted when they get a room with a pool view, they’re even more stoked when they discover a group of similarly aged British blokes have pitched up just across from their balcony. Paddy (The Teacher’s
Samuel Bottomley) and Badger (Ali & Ava’s Shaun Thomas) certainly know how to party – and seem like safe choices to hang out with among the thousands of revellers in the resort.
Arguments, though, quickly ensue among the girls, especially after they discover two of them fancy the same boy – and when Badger is persuaded up on stage to “perform” in front of the heaving crowds, Tara begins to have second thoughts about whether he’s who she wants to have her first “experience” with.
Wandering off in a haze of drunken disillusionment, she encounters Paddy, but discovers he’s not exactly the gentleman she hoped for either.
Upon eventually waking up the next day, Skye and Em are initially delighted to find Tara hasn’t made it home, but that quickly turns to panic when they can find no trace of her, or her movements since the early hours of the morning.
A deserved winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, as well as many other accolades, How to Have Sex is uncomfortable, but unforgettable viewing.
It’s a drama that’s likely to give parents of teens nightmares, but also may prove to be an essential watch for their young people. This is a cautionary tale that compels in its fly-on-the-wall, almost documentary nature and stuns with its sudden shift from full-on celebration of a certain type of youth culture to a sobering reminder of how one moment or action can be so damaging.
Manning Walker does a magnificent job of not only capturing the hormone and alcohol-fuelled chaos and carnage of a party island, but also the much quieter moments of insight, introspection and regret that sometimes (maybe often) follow.
Anchored by a powerhouse performance by McKenna-Bruce, who invites us to see – and cleverly conveys – just how fragile and frightened Tara is behind all the braggadocio, bluster and ill-fitting bikinis, How to Have Sex is powerful, provocative and perturbing viewing.
How To Have Sex is screening in select cinemas nationwide.
How To Have Sex (R16, 91 mins) Directed by Molly Manning Walker Reviewed by James Croot