How To Have Sex review: Teens go wild, bringing out the anxious parent in us all

Holidaying teenage girls learn life's lessons the hard way in Crete in Molly Manning Walker's stomach-churning, compassionate debut feature. Photo / Instagram

REVIEW

How To Have Sex is a wonderful film, but a potential minefield for anyone who wants to see it. “What do you fancy doing for our second date, darling? Shall we see How To Have Sex?” “Good evening madam, are you showing How To Have Sex tonight, and if so may I have a Tango Ice Blast to take in?” “Mavis, I’ve just been reading in the Daily Telegraph about How To Have Sex, and I think we should try it at 3.15pm this Thursday in the main auditorium at the British Film Institute.” And so on, and so on. This might end up being the first film to get its own audience cancelled.

McKenna-Bruce’s brilliantly transparent performance and Manning Walker’s compassionate camera can make you see her as a young woman one moment and a girl the next. Photo / Instagram

It is, of course, a terrifically eye-catching title for a debut feature – but its young British writer and director Molly Manning Walker has more than enough talent to underwrite the mischief. In her debut feature, 29-year-old Manning Walker follows three schoolgirls on a drunken holiday to Malia in Crete, as the 16-year-olds burn off steam after ploughing through their GCSEs. Skye (Lara Peake) is the tall, confident, sexually precocious one, while Em (Enva Lewis) is the academic genius – and also a lesbian, which means the trio’s entanglements with various lunkish male peers are happily none of her concern.

But what about Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce)? She’s still not sure what one she’s meant to be, though clearly hopes the trip will help her puzzle it out. Primarily she’s determined to use it to lose her virginity, which has become a social millstone – not just for Tara, but also Skye, who treats it like an unwanted fourth member of the group. Still, as the plane lands, and they hare to the beach, things couldn’t seem rosier.

“I f***ing love you guys!” They shriek as they frolic in the waves. “Best holiday ever!” Uh oh.

The girls dance, neck shots, perform karaoke, guzzle blue stuff from a fishbowl, then round the evening off with chips, grated cheese, tearful bonding and dry heaving under a bridge. Manning Walker’s wily command of tone and glistening sweat and DayGlo visuals do make you pine to be young again for the first half hour or so of this.

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But then you’re struck by Tara’s vulnerability: McKenna-Bruce’s brilliantly transparent performance and Manning Walker’s compassionate camera can make you see her as a young woman one moment and a girl the next. And when she doesn’t return to the gang’s hotel room after a night out with Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Badger (Shaun Thomas), the cocky northern lads in the suite next door, you feel yourself instantly switching into anxious parent mode.

Yes, Badger is a sweetheart, one neck tattoo featuring the phrase “Hot Legends” under a lipstick print notwithstanding. But Paddy is clearly a player, and when he leads Tara to the beach alone, she doesn’t look like someone whose holiday goal is about to be fulfilled. And even though he does ask her, “Do you want this?”, their deeply uncomfortable encounter shows beyond doubt that consent is more nuanced than the simple obtaining of a box-ticking yes.

A second encounter later in the trip is, if anything, yet more stomach-churning – not least because Paddy clearly can’t discern what his own actions amount to, and it even takes Tara a while to realise what her much-longed-for first times have actually been.

If this makes How To Have Sex sound like a teaching aid, it really isn’t: Manning Walker cares for Tara far too much to turn her into an object lesson, and allows her compensatory moments of grace and delight. (It also allows her and her friends to be hilarious in the way it’s easy to forget teenagers often are, such as the scene in which they rebuff an older man’s flirtations with, “Sorry, we don’t have any spare change.”)

Comparisons to Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun – another beach-holiday-based Cannes debut from a gifted young Brit – are inevitable, but the connections between the two are skin-deep. Wells’s film unfolded as hazily as a formative memory, but Manning Walker’s has the tang and snap of the instant, lived-in moment. When it opens in the UK, make sure you get a ticket, but do have a think about how you’ll ask for it first.