Three best friends head off in the early hours to catch a flight to Malia. They have just finished their GCSEs, and are desperately trying not to think about results. The girls are Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis). What awaits them in the promised land? Drinking and clubbing and boys. Life-changing experiences, sweet and horrific.
Besides looming grades, what’s really weighing on Tara in How to Have Sex (good title) is her virginity. Anyone who has ever been a teenager will sympathise with anxieties around coming-of-age experiences. You need to get them out the way, you yearn for adulthood, you constantly worry about the opinions of friends. Maybe the next generation has a chiller view of such things, but not so for this cohort. For Tara, both robust and childlike, opportunity comes calling (with ill-judged tattoos and bleached hair) in the form of their rowdy hotel neighbours “Badger” (Shaun Thomas), Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Paige (Laura Ambler). The groups mix and, like a lethal combination of too much vodka and not enough Coke, it leads to fun and disaster.
If you grew up in Britain and have ventured on such a holiday, or simply know someone who had that particular pleasure, well-chosen details in How to Have Sex may scare you: the slip and slide of a fluorescent lilo, thin hotel sheets, the daytime chugging of vodka, mere hours after waking up. But the real horror starts halfway in this 90-minute film, when Tara and Paddy hook up on a beach. That should be a moment of celebration or, at very least, relief. Her friends, once she tells them, are delighted. Was it “good” for her? Is she happy? But the truth, like recall of the night, is initially hard to pin down, though realisation comes to Tara in grim waves.
The second half plays out like pure horror, twisting all those familiar details into nightmares and introducing new terrors: half-conversations about the night before, terrible friends doing terrible things. Parents calling about GCSE retakes. A climatic bedroom scene is more heart-stopping than any scary movie I’ve seen this year. McKenna-Bruce shines here, like a horror flick “final girl”, piecing together memories and trying to avoid the bad guy and finding occasional peace in unexpected company.
Heading into How to Have Sex, one is prepared for talking points around sex and consent and how boys treat girls. It is true that the film would be good for teenagers and their parents – and really, anyone who has sex – to watch, but it is entertaining as well as educational. Writer-director Molly Manning Walker, responsible for the cinematography for Scrapper, draws out the group’s relationship dynamic with pleasing ambiguity, capturing the sensory barrage and unrelenting thrum of these teenage escapes. McKenna-Bruce and Bottomley are stand-outs. The film won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and if there’s going to be an Aftersun-shaped sleeper hit for autumn, How to Have Sex fits the bill, not least because its budget holiday setting is so similar and vividly evoked as in Charlotte Wells’ Oscar-nominated debut.
But How to Have Sex is its own thing, cracking open a universal horror at a specific age. If the film feels overly impressionistic at times, it does speak to the constant forward motion of youth: being young is an unending attempt to catch up with your friends or simply where you think you should be. That summer before your friends move onto different schools may feel like your last summer ever. In the years that follow, as you parse those whiplash experiences, you (ideally) learn, and realise that there is still a lot of time to mess up and do things right. Should a 16-year-old have to learn about those things on a summer break? No: no one should ever have to. But people do because people can suck and life moves on. And sometimes, in the back of a taxi or in a departure lounge, you realise that you might be fine or at least okay enough for a while until you actually are.
‘How to Have Sex’ is in cinemas on 3 November
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
