1 star
Three 16-year-old girls go off on their own to the Greek party resort of Malia for seven days of Charles Bukowski-level debauchery. Their holiday goals are simple: get wasted, get laid, repeat. Unfortunately for viewers, what’s exciting to their underage imagination is, for the most part, boring as hell to watch.
Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, How to Have Sex does an excellent job of capturing that precious moment when the ripe bud of youth starts to rot. The three girls – Tara, Sky, and Em – vibrate with hormones as they try to take control of their newfound sense of freedom. But no 16-year-old – male, female, or non-binary – has any control over anything – their bodies, mind, or emotions – even without adding in the copious amounts of alcohol consumed by these three. And Tara, Sky, and Em show no sign of having any life skills to depend upon when things get ugly. So, How to Have Sex becomes an endurance test as you watch the girls spiral out of control while the predatory teenage boys circle them like a hungry pack of wolves. Watching them separate the weakest of the three, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), and then the attack is stomach-turning.
There is a cost to putting an audience through such repellent storytelling. Or there should be. It doesn’t have to be as traditional as having the rapist (because that’s what the one who forces himself on Tara while she’s passed out is) get arrested and go to jail or as cutting edge as having the girls turn the tables and rape him the next time he passes out. But there has to be an ending as powerful as everything leading up to it, or the story is incomplete and leaves the audience questioning why they are watching it in the first place.
That doesn’t happen with How to Have Sex. Tara finally gets the courage to tell one of her two best friends what happened; their reaction – or lack thereof – is appalling. There’s no outrage, no anger. Nothing but a quick “Are you OK?” followed by a promise to return to Malia next year.
So what is the point?
