Minutes into Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex,” the film is already a breath of fresh air. It’s a far cry from Maddy in “Euphoria” screaming expletives between every other word, and it feels different than the Gen-Z pandering in the latest rendition of “Mean Girls.”
The interactions between the three British teen girls at the heart of the film feel free and real. They tease one another, they drunkenly order French fries, they profess their love for each other. They are simply teenagers, and the audience is just a fly on the wall to their conversations.
“How to Have Sex” tells the story of Tara, skillfully played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, and her friends, Skye and Em, played by Lara Peake and Enva Lewis, as they go on an unsupervised trip to celebrate the end of school exams. Skye makes it clear that 16 is an unacceptable age for Tara to have not yet had sex, and she takes the lead in pressuring her friend into finding a boy to “get it done.”
Once you get used to the British slang, what remains is dialogue that feels so true to how a group of 16-year-old girls would talk with one another.
Shortly after they arrive in the Greek town of Malia, where they bounce around between clubs, smoking cigarettes and drinking, the girls befriend a group of boys staying in the hotel room next door. With the mounting pressure from her friends to “finally” have sex, Tara is eventually assaulted by one of the boys. Everyone around her celebrates the “accomplishment,” not seeing her hurt and pain.
The story is a familiar one for director and writer Manning Walker, who said she frequented destinations like Malia with her friends as a teen, and was assaulted at 16.
“It’s a topic I felt wasn’t talked about enough and has always come with lots of shame, so I felt like it was something we had to open up,” Walker said on the red carpet at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, ahead of the film’s screening there. “As we made the film, we realized so many women have been through this experience, so it felt important.”
By drawing on her own experience and teenage memories, Manning Walker enriches the writing and contributes to the highly realistic feeling of the film. She said she wanted a “documentary level of realism,” so she shot on location in Malia and hired a documentary cinematographer to try to “replicate that feeling” they saw in the party scene there.
Manning Walker also knew that her Gen-Z cast would be a key part of achieving the film’s authenticity. She said in a post-screening Q&A that while the final cut follows the script pretty closely, she had the actors do an “experiment” as their last take of each shot, where they could improvise and add whatever they wanted.
Each of these intentional and powerful choices contributed to the realistic representation of these teens and this story, which only makes the careful depiction of Tara’s assault and its aftermath all the more heartbreaking.
The best, most natural dialogue of the film comes in its final minutes. Tara, through broken words and avoidant eye contact, tells Em what really happened with the boy on the trip. Flustered, her friend says, “You should have told me,” before trailing off. It’s an insensitive, imperfect reaction to what Tara just told her, but you believe it. “You’re right, I should have told you,” a resigned and exhausted Tara replies.
“I’ve always been interested in the lack of language we have for each other when someone is going through something,” Manning Walker said of that final scene.
With the film’s success in Europe – it won a top prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and scored three BAFTA nominations on Thursday morning just as the director was preparing for Sundance – Manning Walker said she’s eager for not only young women to see the film, but for young men, too.
“I hope women feel seen and feel like there’s people around them that had also gone through the same things,” she said. “But what was really shocking about releasing it is that lots of men felt they had been in that position and felt they need to change or learn from that, and that’s something we didn’t really expect. And it feels really powerful.”
“‘How to Have Sex” will be released in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 2.