HOW TO HAVE SEX (Melbourne IFF 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

School’s out, and Brit teen best friends Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peak) and Em (Enva Lewis) are off to Crete’s Malia Beach to party their cares away as they wait for their final results. It’s a world of enormous blue curacao-based punch bowl cocktails, passive aggressive frenemies, wardrobes consisting entirely of neon green lycra, and seemingly endless rowdy party-going as Tara sets her sights on losing her virginity. Drawn to the goofy yet sweet Badger (Shaun Thomas), as the nights get wilder and the hangovers more aggressive, Tara is about to learn a major life lesson about power and consent.

Winning filmmaker Molly Manning Walker the 2023 Prix Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and loosely inspired by her own autobiographical memories of how sex was socially positioned when she was a young woman, the power of How to Have Sex stems from its canny contrasting of the fast-paced partygirl lifestyle of Tara and her friends against our slow, creeping realization of what has in fact happened to her. The film’s gut punch stems from the dignity that Manning Walker affords Tara in particular, who as an unambiguously messy, insecure young woman is precisely the kind of character that we don’t often see treated seriously in screen culture – this alone makes the film an important and refreshing experience.

While some overzealous reviewers have breathlessly drawn comparisons with Lynne Ramsay’s 2002 magnum opus Morvern Callar, that both films follow working class young British women on sun-drenched European vacations where things get weird is, frankly, where the similarities end. Manning Walker is good – very good – but she’s no Lynne Ramsay (not yet at least), and if there is a comparison to be made then it’s that How to Have Sex is perhaps at best the after school special Lynne Ramsay never made.

While the film is a significant and much-needed conversation starter regarding the grey areas of sexual assault that screen culture as a whole tends to shy away from, a relatively ham-fisted final scene in an airport reveals the film’s didactic mission a little too aggressively, reminding us that this is in fact very much a debut feature. But make no mistake, it is regardless still a very promising one, and there is no doubt that How to Have Sex marks Manning Walker very much as a filmmaker to watch.

NOTE: Without actors and writers, we wouldn’t have movies. This review was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in the United States, and the author of this review supports them unequivocally.