I’m sitting in a pristine hotel in the centre of London. Across from me, Molly Manning Walker – writer-director of the electric How To Have Sex – and Mia McKenna-Bruce – her leading lady – have plopped themselves down on a velvet chaise lounge. “It’s so funny how they just take away the bed,” giggles a giddy McKenna-Bruce, noting the strange set-up of the room.

The pair are, it seems, both thrilled and a little perplexed to be here. It is, after all, a stark contrast from the grimy, messy Malia hostel room that provides the setting for the film we’re here to discuss. Manning Walker’s first feature film, which lands in UK cinemas on November 3, is already generating plenty of buzz – it took home the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes before taking the UK by storm last month at the London Film Festival. 

How To Have Sex offers an unflinching, visceral exploration of the sinister side of youth party culture in the UK. We follow three 16-year-old friends, Tara (McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake), as they arrive in Malia, ready to have the “best trip ever” – filled, of course, with plenty of hook-ups. Skye is particularly keen for Tara to lose her virginity.

As the girls move from grubby club to grubby club, it’s a blurry, unending sea of neon and glitter and smoke and sweat. They party on and on and on, pausing only to shut their eyes for a few hours in the morning before peeling off their miniskirts and crop tops, changing into new sets and going again. They collect new friends along the way – namely Badger (Shaun Thomas), a tattooed, bleach-blonde chainsmoker with a heart of gold, and his leery, laddy friend Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). When Tara is sexually assaulted twice by Paddy, she struggles to communicate her situation to her two friends. They in turn continue their light-hearted jokes about what they assume is a budding romance with Paddy. And so layers are peeled back, and we see this gleeful debauchery in an increasingly sickening new light.

Inspired by Manning Walker’s own experiences of the rites-of-passage holiday that has become a staple for many in the UK, How To Have Sex is vibrant and exhilarating but also horrifying, real and confronting. It’s a film that feels vital. However, the director says that the film’s financiers initially worried that topics like consent, coercion and misogyny may be a little passé. “They were like, ‘Maybe Gen Z have moved on,’” she says. “‘And everyone’s a bit more understanding and communicative about sex.’”

There was a general feeling that with the rise of shows like Sex Education and I May Destroy You, Gen Z had somehow mastered the topic of consent. And so Manning Walker embarked on a series of workshops, travelling around the UK and speaking to young people about the project. 

“We gave them the assault scenes [from the film], and often, they wouldn’t recognise them as an assault,” she says. “Girls would stand up and be like, ‘Girls need to wear more clothes and drink less alcohol and respect themselves, otherwise, of course, they’re gonna get raped.’ It was really shocking, to be honest.”

It became evident that a film like How To Have Sex wasn’t merely accurate, but needed.

Manning Walker was committed to authenticity from the beginning. Not only did she draw from her own memories and her workshops with young Brits, she also wanted to ensure the central trio arrived on set as a tight-knit group.

“We had quite a long audition period where we were getting to chemistry read together,” says McKenna-Bruce. “We all became really, really close – we clicked straight away.”

This was followed by two weeks of rehearsals, in which the actors experimented and improvised with their characters. “We were able to just be silly and get to know these girls and their friendship,” McKenna-Bruce continues. “And it also meant when we got to set I wasn’t scared to get things wrong, because we’ve just been completely silly with these characters before. It felt really comfortable.”

On set, Manning Walker continued to push for realism in every shot – and that included designing a space that felt almost impossibly real. “In the design of the space, [production designer] Luke [Moran-Morris] was really adamant that every drawer should be filled – it shouldn’t be a set, it should be a lived-in apartment,” she says. “So if it’s a mess, let’s make it really messy everywhere, so that they can move around and pick stuff up. It just created a world rather than creating specific scenes.”

“You were so fully there,” chimes in McKenna-Bruce.

With an almost documentarian gaze, the camera follows Tara as she navigates the holiday: first, manically embracing the bacchanalia of the grotty clubs, and later, coming to terms with the mixture of horror, fear and confusion that follows Paddy’s sexual assaults. 

After finding a profound level of comfort living inside her character’s skin in rehearsal and in her interactions with hyperrealistic spaces on set, McKenna-Bruce was able to sit in and portray Tara’s discomfort with astonishing ease. “It was never about, ‘Oh, I need to take a step into Tara’s shoes right now.’ We were so there.’” This commitment to realism in all aspects of making the film, from preparation to execution, has a jarring, shocking effect at times – our reaction to Tara’s situation can’t be anything but visceral.

In the beginning, we witness only glimpses of the insidious nature of the culture that surrounds the girls. These glimpses come in the form of sexist microaggressions and a widespread ignorance about consent. No one seems to have the language to talk or to even think very seriously about sex. What’s particularly fascinating about How To Have Sex is that Manning Walker’s examination of the problems embedded within our culture doesn’t begin in the club with scary, faceless men – it begins with Tara’s own friends.

“I definitely remember being a teen – those friendships that you have then feel like the be-all and end-all. You know, ‘We’ve said we’re best friends forever, so we have to be best friends forever’, even if they’re not the healthiest of friendships, or if you’re starting to grow in different directions,” says McKenna-Bruce. “I think that’s really where we find these girls.”

Tara is constantly influenced by the more domineering Skye, who tells her what to wear and even encourages her into dangerous sexual situations with the boys they’ve met on their trip. “We see the pressure that Skye’s putting on Tara, but then we also get glimpses of what Skye is going through with her mum not always being so present,” McKenna-Bruce continues. “Humans are complex, and they have their own things going on.”

The carelessness around the issue of consent is also bedded into the film’s location. Everywhere, young people are being encouraged to treat sex as a game. At their hotel, the pool is shaped like a giant penis. In a club, Badger is pulled on stage, stripped and given a blow job by a group of random girls from the crowd. Time after time, it’s made clear that merely stepping off the plane into this world is seen as a silent, pre-emptive ‘yes’ – everyone here, it is assumed, is down for everything.

While consent is too often assumed within this world, the aftermath of assault is also met with silence. Faced with her own confusion and her friends’ blindness, Tara has no way to communicate the reality of her situation. In what is perhaps the most affecting scene of the film, she sits in silence on the balcony of a hotel room with Badger. The noisy chaos of the clubs is gone. Neither have the words to explain how they’re really feeling. Instead, minutes pass as the camera lingers on their faces.

“Silence is a big thing, especially in that space where it’s so manic and there’s this constant bass in the background,” says Manning Walker of the scene. “To get these moments where you reflect on what’s going on around you is really important.

“It’s this concept of finding someone that you can spend time with and reflect with without really having the words to do it at that age.”

It was the last scene they filmed on the entire shoot. “We did all the party scenes first,” says McKenna-Bruce. “And that really gave me space to find this stillness after, because I could feel that shift – I felt the weight of it, because it was so different to a lot of the other stuff that we had filmed.” She adds: “It’s one of my favourite scenes.”

How To Have Sex captures the confusion, elation and, sometimes, the danger of being a British teenage girl on your first party holiday in a way that few films ever have. As a result, it’s already resonating with young women and men alike. It’s something its director and star are still trying to wrap their heads around.

“I spent half of the year sat in a dark room thinking that no one would ever watch the film – it’s kind of mad to then go through the other side of it,” says a dazed Manning Walker.

“It still feels kind of surreal,” chimes in McKenna-Bruce. “Like, I feel like this [experience] is a film in itself.”

How To Have Sex is in cinemas on 3 November and will be streaming on MUBI soon.

Images: MUBI