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 urgent and memorable directorial debut. The film follows three sixteen-year-old friends on a chaotic holiday to Malia, capturing the heady mix of freedom, curiosity and confusion that accompanies the first taste of independence. Walker’s film focuses tightly on female friendship, teenage identity and the complexities surrounding consent, offering a portrayal that is both raw and emotionally precise.
At the center of the story is Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), accompanied by her close friends Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake). The trio revel in post-GCSE liberty—drinking, dancing and testing boundaries on a party island. Walker excels in rendering the sensory overload of such a holiday: booming clubs, fluorescent parties and the collective bravado of youth. The film balances moments of humour and adolescent silliness with a growing undercurrent of threat, creating a picture that is by turns joyful and unsettling.
One of the film’s most effective techniques is its use of close-up work on Tara’s face. These intimate shots convey her fluctuating emotions—euphoria, bewilderment, excitement and fear—without sensationalizing the physical aspects of sexual encounters. By emphasizing Tara’s subjective experience, the film refuses the exploitative posture common in other teen-focused films and instead insists that the viewer stay with the character’s inner life.
Walker deliberately avoids the male gaze that often dominates depictions of young women in cinematic holiday settings. Where films such as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers adopt a voyeuristic perspective that objectifies their characters, How to Have Sex centers female experience and feeling. The camera’s restraint allows the narrative to explore how social pressures—friends, partners and cultural expectations—shape decisions about sex and consent.
The film interrogates the idea that losing one’s virginity is a milestone that must be achieved at any cost. Skye, the confident and more experienced friend, tells Tara that failing to “get laid” on this holiday would mean she never will, a line that encapsulates the peer pressure and anxious competitiveness around sexual experience. Walker lays out how these pressures can transform desire into a task-oriented objective, with real emotional consequences.
In interviews, Walker has discussed her aim to portray consent not as a binary of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but as a complex, often ambiguous negotiation shaped by power, expectations and environment. The film explores the softer, more ambiguous forms of coercion—subtle persuasion, group pressure and the normalization of male entitlement—and how those dynamics can warp clear communication. Importantly, Walker also resists a reductive blame narrative; she highlights how social conditioning affects both sexes while keeping the focus on the experiences of the young women at the story’s center.
Much of the film’s urgency comes from its grounding in real experience. Walker drew on her own memories of teenage holidays and has spoken publicly about surviving a sexual assault at sixteen. Those personal elements lend the film emotional authenticity: it acknowledges that traumatic moments can coexist with joyous memories rather than erasing them. The film’s refusal to simplify survivors’ experiences—by insisting they be wholly defined by trauma—adds to its ethical sensitivity and narrative nuance.
Mia McKenna-Bruce delivers a compelling lead performance, anchoring the film with vulnerability and presence. The ensemble work is strong, and Walker’s direction allows the actors to inhabit their roles with naturalism and specificity. The script avoids melodrama, favoring instead everyday detail and the specific rhythms of teenage conversation, which makes the more intense scenes land with inevitable force.
As a piece of contemporary British cinema, How to Have Sex speaks to broader cultural conversations about sexual consent, education and the socialization of young people. Its frankness and refusal to sentimentalize make it a provocative and necessary film for adult viewers and for anyone interested in how young people navigate intimacy in a media-saturated world.
Score: 22/24
Rating: ★★★★
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Written by Gala Woolley
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