How to Have Sex

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. 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.

Director Molly Manning Walker's How to Have Sex hums with life. It's both dreamlike and dreadful, unfolding with a tenacity that few first-time filmmaker can conjure. By subverting teen movie tropes and spotlighting the very personal experience of one girl, How to Have Sex is able to make grand statements about the patriarchy, about gender, and about the teenage experience.

It's a vivid, intimate film coursing with truth about what it's like to navigate that world. How to Have Sex is naturalistic, thoughtful, and deeply, deeply uncomfortable because, over its tight 90 minutes, there are familiar behaviours that almost anyone will remember from their own adolescence — and wish they could forget.

"How to Have Sex" resists much of the obvious confrontation and catharsis you'd expect in movies of this type, instead trading in the thwarted impulses and micro-reactions of real life, and it's all the more devastating for it.