Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while. Writer and director Molly Manning Walker is the complete package: a storyteller with an acute ear for youth vernacular; a film-maker with a gift for capturing images that sear themselves into your eyes, while also filling each frame with a sensory overload of energy and movement; and a director who can tease remarkably intimate and revealing moments from actors while simultaneously marshalling a club full of several hundred hard-partying extras. And the film’s star, Mia McKenna-Bruce, is a revelation. You have to go back to Florence Pugh’s breakout role in Lady Macbeth to find another career-making performance that so emphatically announces an actor destined for greatness.
How to Have Sex, which won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in May, takes one of the central themes of innumerable 1990s and 00s teen comedies – the desperate quest to lose your virginity (and preferably party to oblivion at the same time) – and peels back the riotous excess and hedonism to uncover some uncomfortable questions about the grey areas of consent and the coercive influence of peers. Walker’s handling of the film’s tonal range is remarkably assured: the picture is skittish, spirited and very funny, and at the same time troubling and bruisingly sad.
