How to Have Sex (2023)
Director: Molly Manning Walker
Screenwriter: Molly Manning Walker
Starring: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Enva Lewis, Lara Peake, Daisy Jelley, Laura Ambler, Shaun Thomas, Samuel Bottomley
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes 2023, How to Have Sex is Molly Manning Walker’s striking feature debut that follows three sixteen-year-olds on a chaotic girls’ holiday in Malia. The film is at once celebratory and unsettling: it captures the exhilaration of newfound freedom while probing the murky, complicated reality of young sexual encounters and the pressures that shape them. Walker’s direction is confident and intimate, and the screenplay resists easy answers, instead presenting consent and desire as complex, emotionally charged experiences.
The story centers on Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), whose friendship is the film’s beating heart. Fresh from finishing their GCSEs, they dive into nights of drinking, dancing and reckless abandon. Walker stages these sequences with a naturalistic eye for teenage behaviour: the late-night rituals, the impulsive bravado, and the tender private exchanges all ring true. At the same time, the film never shies away from the darker undercurrents that run beneath moments of raucous fun.
A key strength of the film is the way it maps Tara’s interior life. Close-ups of her face are used repeatedly to show how intense emotions—joy, anxiety, confusion—can exist simultaneously. These intimate shots prioritize the character’s subjective experience over voyeuristic spectacle, a deliberate choice that separates this film from other portrayals of teenagers on holiday. Rather than reducing the characters to objects of the male gaze, Walker centers their perspective and renders their sexuality with sensitivity and nuance.
The film also examines the social dynamics that push young people toward sexual encounters. Skye, the more experienced member of the trio, articulates a common refrain—“if you don’t get laid on this holiday, you never will”—and the film uses lines like this to show how sex can be reframed as a goal, a marker of status or adulthood. That pressure comes from peers, from internalized expectations, and from the hyper-sexualized environments the characters find themselves in. Walker avoids simplistic blame, instead exploring how cultural norms, upbringing and peer dynamics all contribute to the choices the teenagers make.
Walker has spoken about consent not as a binary, but as a spectrum—an idea that the film articulates through scenes that highlight ambiguity, coercion and the ways consent can be complicated by alcohol, expectation and fear of judgment. By concentrating on the teenager’s perspective, the film forces viewers to sit with uncertainty rather than offering tidy moral conclusions. This approach makes the film a valuable conversation-starter: it encourages audiences to think more deeply about how consent operates in real life, especially among young people learning about sex in wildly uneven contexts.
Performances anchor the film’s emotional realism. Mia McKenna-Bruce gives a compelling and vulnerable central turn as Tara, communicating more through small gestures and expressions than through expository dialogue. Her portrayal makes the character’s confusion and yearning palpable. Enva Lewis and Lara Peake provide strong support as Em and Skye, respectively, creating a believable dynamic that shifts between solidarity and tension as the holiday progresses. The ensemble cast, including Daisy Jelley, Laura Ambler, Shaun Thomas and Samuel Bottomley in supporting roles, contributes to a textured social world that feels lived-in and specific.
Cinematography and sound design work together to evoke sensory overwhelm. Club scenes and crowded beaches are staged as an assault on the senses: flashing lights, pounding music and cluttered visuals convey how disorienting these spaces can be for young people trying to negotiate identity and desire. When the film narrows its focus, reducing the frame to a single face or a single moment, those sensory details recede and the emotional truth of the characters becomes clearer. This contrast is central to the film’s power.
Beyond its formal merits, the film is rooted in personal memory. Walker has acknowledged that elements of the story draw from her own teenage experiences, including both joyful and traumatic memories. That personal grounding adds a layer of honesty to the narrative; the film recognizes that difficult experiences do not erase happier ones, and it resists labeling characters solely as victims or villains. Instead, it offers a more humane and complicated portrait of adolescence.
As a work of debut filmmaking, How to Have Sex demonstrates a clear voice and moral seriousness. It balances humor with urgency, and it treats its characters with empathy even when showing them make poor decisions. The film’s exploration of friendship, vulnerability and the messy realities of early sexual encounters makes it both timely and important. While the subject matter can be challenging, the film’s compassionate perspective and strong performances make it essential viewing for anyone interested in contemporary youth culture and the shifting conversations around consent.
Score: 22/24
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Written by Gala Woolley
If you appreciated this review, consider following the author’s work and engaging in conversations about consent, representation and how films can responsibly portray young people’s experiences.