How to Have Sex (Manning-Walker, 2023)

Written by Tom Augustine.

Warning: This review refers to sexual assault.

It’s been quite the time for young female directors from the United Kingdom. A number of stirring debuts or assured follow-up efforts have been dotting the festival and independent landscape in the last few years, defiantly flying the flag of youthful, vital cinema in a time where the alarm bells are ringing world-over about the future of funding sources for such efforts. In a time of such bleakness in our media landscape, thank God for the likes of Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), Clio Barnard (Ali & Ava, The Arbor), Charlotte Regan (Scrapper), Rose Glass (Saint Maud), Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean), Frances O’Connor (Emily), Nida Manzoor (Polite Society), Sarah Gavron (Rocks), Raine Allen-Miller (Rye Lane), as well as the trailblazers that carved their path like Andrea Arnold, Joanna Hogg and Lynne Ramsay. Chances are you’ve watched one of these films in recent times, or at the very least heard of them. This kind of varied and eclectic output comes from a concentrated effort to push diverse and young voices – an approach our overwhelmingly, cruelly arts-negative governing bodies could take a lesson or two from. Perhaps the most-lauded and most excitedly buzzed-about of the lot is Molly Manning-Walker, who took Cannes by storm in 2023 with her neon and booze-drenched How to Have Sex, winner of the Un Certain Regard top prize. Manning-Walker, a portrait of British cool, is about as authentic an avatar for a new British cinema as you could hope for – a presence she backs with an assured and confident directorial approach.

Arriving on New Zealand screens after a triumphant appearance at last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival, How to Have Sex has the hazy, lurid feeling of a half-remembered, boozy holiday, perhaps because it draws so heavily on Manning-Walker’s own experiences. The alcohol-fuelled rite of passage for young high school grads is one that can be found in many corners of the Western world – here in Aotearoa, teens and twenty-somethings let off steam at Rhythm at Vines or some other godforsaken New Year’s music festival. For Brits, a sun-drenched European holiday destination is the name of the game. For the girls of How to Have Sex, that place is Malia, on the Greek Island of Crete, a party town frozen in constant revelry, a hedonistic, suffocating limbo to rival any number of cinematic purgatories of years past. Tara, Em and Skye (McKenna-Bruce, Laura Peake and Enva Lewis) arrive ready for a summer of drinking, pashing and dancing the night away – and for the first part of How to Have Sex, that’s exactly what happens. The vivid, dazzling intensity of these early sequences is enough to cleverly mask Manning-Walker’s unflinching, deliberate pacing; we are lured into a joyous sense of abandon alongside the girls, only for it to be overturned. 

Winner of last year’s Un Certain Regard Festival Prize, along with three BAFTAS, Molly Manning-Walker’s assured and authentic debut walks a fine line between arthouse cinema and strident didacticism – a line it mostly succeeds at following. Anchored by a striking performance from Mia McKenna Bruce, it’s both a squirm-inducing depiction of hazy youthful abandon and a teachable moment for younger audiences. 

When a group of boys are introduced – in particular, young hooligans Badger (Shaun Thomas) and Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) – the audience has a sense of where this story has the potential to go. There’s the confrontational title of the film, as well as our awareness of what happens when booze and hormones and questionable intentions mix. When a line is crossed between Tara and one of the boys, the holiday is turned on its head, and what is most commendable and bracing about How to Have Sex is the way it meaningfully and openly explores the murky world of teen sexuality and the nature of consent in a world where the dust of the MeToo moment is still settling. Manning-Walker is rigorous in her rooting of our perspective of the world through Tara’s eyes. Everyone has had a night that has gone from fun to unbearable in a matter of moments, but witnessing McKenna-Bruce’s wondrous rendering of Tara’s fragility, anxiety and unsurety quickly turns How to Have Sex into a distinctly uncomfortable watch. Manning-Walker’s decision making in how exactly the issue of consent has been trampled over in Tara’s particular case is telling. There’s enough grey area to allow for uncertainty – that is, until you see Tara’s face and you realise that the situation is very certain.

Manning-Walker has spoken repeatedly about her desire for the film to be utilised as a way to get the message out among the youth about the importance of consent, and to expose how we all still have work to do to make sure everyone feels safe during sex. If this makes How to Have Sex sound like a scolding slog, it isn’t at all – Manning-Walker is too assured a manager of tone and rhythm to allow that to happen. How to Have Sex is by turns joyous, hilarious, fascinating, disturbing and stressful, but perhaps most interestingly, it is also intended to be educational. Manning-Walker has actively encouraged the film’s screening at schools in Britain, and it would do well to be played to young audiences here – there’s the sense of a conversation being started by young people for young people. It’s not a film that talks down to its audience, whether that be young women or young men. It is a message film, but it’s an anomaly as well – a teachable tool that (mostly) justifies itself as an artistic endeavour. Didacticism is incredibly hard to execute in cinema. We need only look to the likes of Adam McKay to see its failures. When a director openly states they intend for their film to provide some sort of moral instruction, we critics tend to put our barriers up – but when the messaging is as well-executed, kind-hearted and bold as it is here, it’s relatively easy to look past the film’s clunkier elements. Most notable of these is a condensed, not-entirely-convincing ending. One gets the sense of Manning-Walker being cornered by the structure she’s created for herself, to create a sort of resolution where often in situations like this resolution is a very difficult thing to come by. Viewed through the lens of education though, one can see why this somewhat inelegant landing is perhaps the only method that ultimately would’ve worked. The first stories we were ever told had morals at the end of them, after all – is it childish for a film to do the same, or is it simply a case of an artist trying to reach us in the most tried and true method possible?

How To Have Sex is in cinemas now.

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