The Best of British Cinema: ‘How to Have Sex’ (2023)

Molly Manning Walker’s debut is a difficult but essential viewing experience

Trigger warning: this essay will discuss sexual harassment/assault. I did my best to do so tactfully and cautiously, but would recommend not reading this piece for those who find such discussions triggering.

When I moved home in 2014, away from all that I had known into a new area in which I struggled to fit in, I found escapism in the British teen-comedy sit-com The Inbetweeners. It was a show that I had heard mentioned in a legendary context many times, something built up as a kind of cultural behemoth in my then 12-year-old mind, and I had to see and understand it. I found comfort in the show, mainly because it represented Simon Bird’s character William McKenzie as somebody similar to me — an awkward outsider struggling to fit into a new context, one that calls for him to be more socially active as well as more mature in his interests. I watched the show often, to the point that for a long time I would put it on when I went to sleep as, at the time, I struggled to get to sleep due to what I now recognise as anxiety.

The Inbetweeners Movie follows the show’s four leading characters — Will, Simon, Jay and Neil — as they go on an all-out archetypal ‘lads’ holiday. Now, I should not have been watching The Inbetweeners as a 12 year old. That is true. But, I and everybody I spoke to at school had seen it, could quote it, and so on. It was part of the culture that we grew up on. The film follows the four men as their holiday, expectedly, goes horribly wrong — their efforts to impress women mostly fail, their lofty visions of drunken glory turn to a nauseating reality, their expectations are completely crushed. But the film concludes with a happy ending, one that sees the four men all find what they were looking for even if things haven’t gone quite as they expected. It’s a comedy, after all — things must end well. Their sexism is played for laughs, their attempts to ‘woo’ women are turned to slapstick, their attempts to convince women to have sex with them are turned down, but they maintain their ‘lads lads lads’ ideal.

On top of this — and, again, like many others who I knew in secondary school — I saw The Hangover as a child. I must have been 10 or so when I saw the film, which similarly depicts a group of men who go out on a stag-do with the intention to have sex as much as possible while out of their minds on alcohol and drugs. Again, things go wrong and hijinks ensue but everything is ultimately fine. This is the culture that men of my age grew up with — you can indulge in your hedonism, things will go wrong but they will be fine. You can be a sexist pig like Jay Cartwright in The Inbetweeners, and people will know you’re ‘only joking’ and that it’s all for a laugh at the end of the day. You can do anything and there aren’t serious repercussions.

Perhaps thankfully, I was crippled by social anxiety and never indulged myself much as a teen. My fears around vomiting meant that I never got to drinking too much and soon found that there’s nothing at the bottom of a bottle other than a headache or feeling nauseated. I felt the same pressure (especially as a boy, I think) to lose my virginity at a young age as if it were a conquest and a victory.

How to Have Sex, the debut feature film from Molly Manning Walker (who previously served as cinematographer on Scrapper), subverts the ideas that have been put forth by this generation’s culture. It looks at media like The Hangover and The Inbetweeners and gives a woman’s answer to what the extreme hedonism and sexuality that that media focuses on. It questions, quite forcefully, the horrifying repercussions of a culture that is so intensely focused on sex, on what happens to a culture that is exposed too young to pornography (I believe I first saw pornography when I was around age 11) and becomes addicted to it, ‘learning’ from it how sex supposedly works when reality is entirely different. Men of my generation are crippled by their mental health, warped by exposure to extreme violence in video games, movies and TV and by exposure to explicit pornography and sexualised imagery. And many, like myself, grew up fatherless and had to try to navigate adolescence without a male role model which undoubtedly has an impact all of its own.

I am not defending what happens in this film — not at all — I am just trying to describe the kind of cultural problems that Manning Walker’s film is engaging with and challenging, which it does almost flawlessly. I, and many others of my generation, found themselves having even mild sexual encounters (often, at too young of an age to process them appropriately) and then being absolutely plagued by guilt and by self-disgust, unwittingly entering a cycle of lust followed by disgust and shame. I still cannot shake these difficulties today, to a certain extent, and know of others my age who feel similarly. Again, How To Have Sex looks at a much worse sexual encounter for Tara (and the film is focused on women’s experiences in this realm, primarily) but the film does reflect this strange relationship with sex that my generation has.

The film follows a trio of 16 year old girls who are just beginning an exciting holiday in Malia, Greece, when we first meet them. They’re headed to their hotel — one filled exclusively with other British people as far as we see, of course — and they’re excitedly discussing their plans for their four day stay. Their aims are simple — just like the men in The Inbetweeners and The Hangover, they want to indulge themselves completely. They make a kind of bet that whoever has the most sex can have the comfiest bed in their hotel room, and they manage to gather an incredible amount of alcohol togetherness for themselves and any visitors.

When, on the morning of their second day in Malia, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is doing her make-up on the trio’s balcony, she is called to by ‘Badger’ (Shaun Thomas, who some will recognise from The Selfish Giant) the audience immediately tightens up and becomes uncomfortable. We know where things will go quite quickly, or at least can make an educated guess. Here are the boys on their ‘lads’ holiday, with the same aims as the girls. Tara is slightly charmed by Badger’s confidence and humour, and the trio agree to meet Badger and his friends later on. When the two groups come together, things begin to worsen. And what follows is a really tough to watch 90 minutes that holds so much authenticity that I was deeply, deeply moved.

Shot with grounded cinematography which helps to hold the audience in the ‘reality’ of the situations they’re being shown on screen and edited with an insanely keen eye (one which knows exactly when to cut and how to cut for maximum emotional impact, it seems), How to Have Sex is, ironically, sobering. It captures with frightening legitimacy what happens when my generation tries to navigate relationships and sex and finds that everything that they have been sold about sexuality is untrue. There is a deep horror to it, one that we were consistently promised was not there, and we don’t know how to approach or reckon with it. We are placed under immense social pressure to lose our virginities, to mature, to have sex, to drink, that we do so before we are ready and traumatise ourselves permanently. And so, when Tara has sex with Paddy (one of Badger’s friends) in a much, much less than ideal experience, she is justifiably horrified. Paddy has attacked her, failing to get consent properly. And he acts as though nothing has happened, seemingly completely unaware that what he does to Tara — on two occasions — is wrong. Paddy is the kind of young man who saw The Inbetweeners but who never learned that what those characters did (or claimed to do) was wrong. There is, of course, more to blame for this kind of behaviour than the type of media consumed by someone, but it surely plays into these problems.

Its representation of Tara as she begins to realise what culture has told her about sex and how her own sexual assault is something that she feels she must conceal is unspeakably effective. I was stunned into silence, and am only now ‘talking’ through my keyboard because I could do nothing else other than talk about this film and its impact. The performances are strikingly real (especially from McKenna-Bruce and Thomas, who are both fantastic), the cinematography is slightly poetic in its beauty but held tightly to reality by the sheer emotion of what is happening on screen and the sheer cumulative power of what we’re being shown is immense. The brilliant contrast between the excitement and hope of the film’s opening scene and its scene of the girls leaving their hotel is a perfect summary — we have been sold a lie, we have been told that our hedonism will save us from our pains. Tara, like many others, has at some point crossed the line between drinking and partying for fun and then drinking to escape from troubles or to try to cope with them. And the men around her, with their “what happens on holiday stays on holiday” attitude (to quote the film’s Paddy), are constantly trying to find ways to take advantage of this.

There are some phenomenal key images used in the film which serve as summaries of its idea. Within the first few minutes, there is a beautiful shot of the three girls’ silhouettes as they play together in the sea and have actual fun on their holiday. There is one particularly memorable shot of a street full of bars and clubs during the day, looking as though it has been swept through by a tornado. This shot is used twice — the first time, it is empty and lifeless. The second time, Tara walks down the street, holding herself and gently crying. One other shot which comes to mind was Tara, in focus, with Paddy lying behind her. We can barely see him, but his hand on Tara’s shoulder is visible and in-focus, and it’s more than enough to make us shudder given the context.

In terms of its focus and its style, I was reminded of a few different films. Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade came to mind in both terms — the aesthetic was similar at times, as was the use of pop music to anchor some of the ideas behind the film, and both look at how contemporary culture impacts the current generation growing up with it. I was also reminded, stylistically, of great films like Moonlight, Aftersun and The Florida Project (all three of which I hold close to my heart) because of the film’s visuals and its approach to character. This film, like those three, is very observant of its characters but remains grounded in cinematic realism. Its subjectivity is captured by changing the focal depth of a shot (like the aforementioned shot of Tara lying with Paddy — she stays in focus, withdrawing, while Paddy is out of focus except for his awful, lingering hand) rather than by more forcefully showing us a certain perspective. I always like this approach, maybe because it is a little less guided than most films and relies on the audience to engage themselves with what’s happening, and it works very well here.

On a formal level, I can’t fault the film at all. I have my questions, immediately following the film, about its last couple of minutes and their intended meaning, but I’m not sure that I want that mystery to be solved for me. I think I would prefer to let it sit with me, to be unpacked slowly or maybe on a future rewatch. I’d be curious to hear any opinions on that final scene from others. But, overall, How to Have Sex left me reeling. It’s incredibly powerful, excellently made and bold in what it has to say and how it says it. The fact that it didn’t receive more love or coverage is shocking to me, despite the fact that 2023 was populated by some phenomenal cinema.

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