Three Teen Girls’ Spring Break From Hell

All Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) wants to do is get to the coastal Greek town of Malia, get some quality time with her BFFs — Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) — and spend the next few days getting royally fucked up. This unholy trinity of 16-year-olds have just finished their final exams back in London, and now they’re heading to one of those sunbaked Mediterranean resorts favored by British teens looking to blow off steam. The plan is to use “party” as a verb as much as possible, and the fact that they manage to sweet-talk the front-desk receptionist into giving them a poolside room suggests their lucky streak is just beginning. This is going to be one for the scrapbooks.

Tara also has a secondary agenda while she’s on vacation: losing her virginity. It’s not that she needs to, but her more experienced friends keep teasing her about it, and Tara is starting to feel a little pressure. What better place to do it than here, surrounded by dozens of hot drunk dudes? What could go wrong?

There’s a distinct girls-gone-wild vibe that permeates from the first part of How to Have Sex, writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s debut; the getaway may be regional, hooking into a very specific European tourist attraction, but the debauchery is universal. It initially strikes you as a modern spin on the femcentric beach-trip genre, from 1960s chestnuts like Where the Boys Are to Spring Breakers (at least before Harmony Korine’s cult classic goes off the surreal deep end). The wafting aura emanating from this coming-of-age drama smells like a recognizable teen spirit, which resembles a cross between Axe body spray, spillage from rail-liquor shots, and pheromones. Even the handwringing about virginity feels quaint. Except Walker has more on her mind than just rites-of-spring-break hedonism.

Amidst all the shirtless bros grinding up against them at nightclubs, a prospective candidate immediately presents himself. His name is Badger (Shaun Thomas), and he’s part of the crew that has the room next to Tara and friends. The badly dyed hair, the questionable tattoos (i.e. “Badger” arcing across abdomen à la “Thug Life”) and his stunning lack of game suggests he’s just another clumsy horndog out to score, but there’s also a kind of inherent sweetness about him as well. He definitely comes off better than Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), one of Badger’s two traveling companions. Something seems off about him.

Both trios end up palling around together, hitting up the bars and crashing en masse in each other’s rooms. Then, when Badger participates in a particularly sleazy contest by the hotel pool, a slightly disillusioned Tara slips off. The next morning, no one knows where she is. And when she eventually returns to her friends, we get a glimpse of how a bad decision suddenly casts a dark shadow over this whole sunny excursion.

And it’s here that How to Have Sex reveals not only that yes, the title is indeed dripping with irony, but that Walker is playing off the entire notion of how these types of experiences — and these types of movies — treat the minefield of girl-you’ll-be-a-women-soon sexuality among adolescents. The filmmaker has said that the idea for this story came to her when she was discussing a similar trip she took as a teen, and how matter-of-factly outrageous, dodgy situations were being reminisced about. While concepts like consent and what constitutes assault have radically changed over the years, some horrible elements involving toxicity have remained dangerously, depressingly the same. It’s also what makes what happens to Tara after she comes back that much worse.

That Walker knows how to handle such things without being sensationalistic, as well as tenderly sketching the tension and sensitivity that characterize female friendships at that age, is what keeps the film from being a boozy, sunburnt tragedy. McKenna-Bruce, however, is what makes Sex feel like you’re watching an uncomfortably personal, near-poetic home movie of a vacation turning into a horror story. She’s giving such an open, vulnerable performance, so much of which revolves around wordless scenes of her quietly trying to process what’s happened; Walker often just keeps the camera on McKenna-Bruce lost in her own thoughts, because she knows she’s working with someone who can make thinking seem screen-worthy and compelling. Both of them force you to walk a mile in Tara’s tattered flip-flops, and then ask yourself: How do we treat these types of teenage transitional experiences? And how do we keep them from turning into generational traumas again, and again, and again?