Throughout Molly Manning Walker’s arresting debut feature How to Have Sex, the phrase ‘best holiday ever’ is thrown about a lot by our lead trio of 16 year old heroines as they traipse the Greek party island of Malia, whether it’s yelling it full volume at the beach or whispering it in a drunken dozy haze back at their hotel room. It’s the kind of youthful enthusiasm and optimism that the world loves to beat out of people, especially young women, and so it proves here in a consistently stressful look at the rites of passage that turn kids into adults for better or, more often, worse.
A somewhat autobiographical tale for Walker, but transplanted from her own teen years in the early 2010s to the present day, How to Have Sex follows 16 year old Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) and her two best friends as they go to Malia with the twin goals of forgetting about their imminent GCSE results and getting the virginal Tara laid. Pretending to be 18, they’re swiftly caught in the orbit of their rowdy 19/20-year-old male hotel neighbours; one of them is called Badger (played by Shaun Thomas) and has a neck tattoo that says ‘Hot Legends’ – and he’s the nice one.
The less nice one is the charismatic but pushy Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), and it’s he who will provide Tara her first sexual experience, one that does little but make her feel profoundly unsafe, sitting a discomfortingly grey area with regards to consent. It’s a very grim and hard-to-watch moment, as is the aftermath, in which Tara has no idea how to articulate what she’s feeling to her friends, especially the sexually pushy yet rather insecure Skye (Lara Peake), or even really to herself. McKenna-Bruce, who is in her 20s but really convinces as a teenager, makes a powerful impression in her first starring role, with more than a little of Florence Pugh’s breakout roles in The Falling and Lady Macbeth informing her chaotic charm.
It helps that Walker’s writing really captures the idiocy of 16 year olds – you’re always 100% rooting for Tara and co, but they are, especially at the beginning, very annoying in that way that excitable and drunk teenagers simply, unavoidably, are. Before the fateful Paddy encounter, Walker also manages to skilfully immerse us in this party world – depending on your own constitution, the clubbing scenes might bring back memories (good or ill) or simply look like hell on earth, but they’re undeniably immersive, soaking you in a sheen of booze, sweat, vomit, and sleep deprivation. Perhaps the most cathartic scene in the whole film is the one in which Tara simply gets to bed while sober and before the sun’s come up – by this point you’re almost as ready for a good night’s sleep as she is.
Though Tara’s friends don’t get much room to feel like full-fledged characters of their own, instead filling into the archetypes of ‘caring lesbian’ and ‘the jealous one’, Walker manages to fit some insightful looks into teenage friendship at the end. It’s unspoken, but you know as the credits roll that this is really the end of this trio, the similarities that kept them together at school clearly no longer strong enough bindings. It’s the kind of ending that rings true in a way that a lot of coming-of-age films don’t, unsentimental about the connections that young people lose to time, going beyond the provocative title to deliver a look at the universal anxiety that you’ve missed out on, or fucked up, your life’s milestone ‘movie’ moments.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 