How to Have Sex review: Teens go wild in a stark, devastating coming-of-ager

In How to Have Sex, Molly Manning Walker’s gut-punch debut about 16-year-olds running riot at a Grecian resort, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) finds herself hit, in the middle of the dance floor, by a sudden rush of self-awareness. It roots her back in her body and amplifies every sensation. It makes everything too loud, too close, too chaotic. Out of nowhere, her haze has dissipated and, now, she can only see the ugliness of the world.

The moment arrives around How to Have Sex’s halfway mark, as Tara and her friends, Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis), arrive in Malia, Crete, intent to treat the resort town as their own hedonistic Neverland. Here, a thousand miles from home – and their GCSE results – they’ll drink until they puke. They’ll hook up with boys they’ll never see again. And Tara, she hopes, will finally discard her virginity.

Described by its director as loosely autobiographical, How to Have Sex is built around a subtle but devastating rug-pull that exposes the culture of sex and consent in the same way F Scott Fitzgerald put the Jazz Age on blast in The Great Gatsby. But, here, the allure of glamour and liberty dissolves long before anyone gets hit by a yellow Rolls-Royce. Tara watches the boy she just met (Shaun Thomas), who seemed sweet and kind despite being named Badger, get swept up in one of the resort’s dubious sex games. After that, nothing in Walker’s film feels quite the same.

The director has ensured, though, that both sides of the chasm are full-heartedly believable. At first, the girls are carefree, screaming karaoke like they’re trying to break the sound barrier, slurping cocktails out of fishbowls, and declaring their love for each other while trying not to vomit over their cheesy chips. The hangovers seem painful, and yet the trio drag themselves back into action like they’re soldiers fighting the horniest of wars. Cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni (Walker herself served as DP on Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper, released back in August) carefully manipulates our point of view. At first, the camera is kept close. After the mood shifts, scenes are captured in slow, paranoid zooms.

It’s an ordinary story that feels so powerful because Walker and her talented, young cast know exactly how to tell it, down to each micro-expression. Peake, as Skye, suggests an almost subconscious kind of toxicity – she’s the friend whose harmless jokes and occasional heedlessness are secretly a way to keep someone in their place. Lewis, as Em, is the empathetic counterbalance, who can sense things she can’t quite explain and feels powerless to intervene in. When Badger starts to quietly distance himself from his more forward friend, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), the feeling of an uncomfortable history between the pair leaves room for both complicity and cluelessness.

But no moment feels as stark, or as brutally portrayed, as Tara slowly stumbling back to her hotel the morning after a very bad night. The streets are now abandoned, dirty, and silent. Her cheeks are red and puffy. Tears sting at the corners of her eyes. And yet, even with no one around, she still won’t fully allow herself to cry. What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.

Dir: Molly Manning Walker. Starring: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Enva Lewis, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Laura Ambler. 15, 91 minutes

‘How to Have Sex’ is in cinemas from 3 November