As the British import How to Have Sex opens, three British teenagers—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis)—arrive in a Greek coastal town for a week of partying following the completion of their exams. While the other two plunge readily into the overtly hedonistic chaos, Tara is a bit more reticent at first—not only is she sweating out the results of those exams, which she suspects she did not do well on, but she is, as her friends keep reminding her, still a virgin and under subtle pressure from them to take care of that issue during her stay. At first, she has a certain attraction to Badger (Shaun Thomas), who is sharing the hotel room next door with his friends Paddy (Samuel Bottomley) and Paige (Laura Ambler) but things take a turn over the course of one drunken night, resulting in the sleazier Paddy swooping in to take her to the beach and do the deed before bailing on her. While the act is technically of a consensual nature, it becomes clear that Tara is struggling to come to terms with exactly what happened to her and her inability to articulate these feelings, either to her friends or to herself.
Although the premise may at first evoke memories of countless schlocky comedies about teenagers going crazy and trying to get laid, How to Have Sex is nothing along those lines. If it resembles anything, it is Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in the way that it illustrates how the ostensible dream of partying hearty can curdle into something nightmarish in such subtle and intricate ways that it can be almost impossible for participants to determine which stage they are on at any given point. However, instead of turning into a simple morality tale, debuting writer-director Michelle Manning-Walker is more interested in exploring more challenging aspects such as the ambiguities of Tara’s situation (which are put into starker relief when she later finds herself in a similar but far more overt direct act), the slippery nature of teen friendships (despite their exhortations of being friends forever, you get the sense early on that the union of the three girls is nearing its end) and the very nature of consent and the difficulties of voicing it when you are at a point where you are not sure what to say or how to say it. Also I must confess that I occasionally struggled to understand some of the dialogue due to the accents, Manning-Walker tells her story with such intensity and urgency—boosted in no small part by the strong and ultimately heartbreaking performance from McKenna-Bruce—that it always rings clear and true, even as it refuses to wrap things up in a tidy package. How to Have Sex is a strong debut film and one of the most impressive looks at the perils and pleasures of teen doom I have seen in a while.
Set in 45,000 BC, Out of Darkness tells the story of a group of six Stone Age nomads who have made a perilous journey across the sea in search of a place to make their home, ending up on a rocky and desolate beach that seems to be devoid of exactly the things they need to thrive and persevere. While the chief, Adem (Chuku Modu) remains certain that he and his mighty spear will be able to provide, the others—including his pregnant wife Ave (Iola Evans), tribal elder Odal (Arno Luening), Adem and Ave’s son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), Adem’s younger brother, Geirr (Kit Young) and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a stray girl who they picked up along the way, mostly as a spare uterus for when Ave can no longer have children—have their doubts and they are exacerbated when it becomes increasingly evident that the area is also home to some kind of fierce creature. When the unseen (though definitely heard) being makes its presence known in increasingly gruesome ways, the group tries to hatch a number of plans to either capture or come to terms with it, eventually going so far as to offer up Beyah as bait. Not surprisingly, Beyah objects to this approach and while the others find themselves getting picked off one by one, she uses her underestimated intelligence and cunning to try to figure out what it is and what it wants.
The film marks the feature directorial debut of Andrew Cumming and it certainly an ambitious undertaking, especially for a first-timer—not only has it been shot in a particularly inhospitable-seeming section of the Scottish Highland and told via an entirely invented language in the manner of one of its more obvious influences, Quest for Fire. The early scenes are quite effective in establishing the lay of the land and the increasingly strained relationships between the members of the tribe while at the same time slowly building an almost palpable sense of dread as the unknown thing in their midst begins to make itself more apparent. Once the film becomes more of a cat-and-mouse pursuit, one that feels similar to the wonderful Predator prequel Prey from a couple of years ago, it gradually gets less interesting, though the undeniably compelling and convincing performance from Oakley-Green helps keep things moving along. Alas, not even her efforts can quite make up for the lackluster final scenes in which the creature, which has been hidden in the shadows up till this point, finally reveals itself and the excitement is replaced by clumsy metaphors. Still, Cumming demonstrates a flair for developing screen tension and if he can one day combine that with a script that is solid throughout, perhaps he can soon live up to the promise that Out of Darkness is ultimately not quite able to achieve.
Set in 2005, Laura Chinn’s feature debut Suncoast tells the story of Doris (Nico Parker), a Florida teenager whose life for the last 10 years has been dominated by the plight of her younger brother, Max (Cree Kawa), who has been rendered blind, deaf and in a wheelchair due to aggressive brain cancer. As the story begins, Doris and her stressed mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), have taken him to a hospice center for what appears to be his last days and come across a literal mob scene—the center, as it turns out, is the same one housing Terri Schiavo, a woman who became the center of controversy and debate when, after spending more than a decade in a persistent vegetative state, her husband petitioned to remove her feeding tube and let her die. While Kristine stresses out over the plight of her son and the gathering of protestors outside the facility, Doris has simply become too exhausted by it all to care much anymore—she avoids visiting as much as possible and is more concerned with trying to fit in with the cool girls at school than to come to terms with her impending loss. On one of her rare visits, she meets and ends up befriending Paul (Woody Harrelson), a guy still mourning the death of his wife who is there to protest the plans to remove Schiavo’s tube, and this new friendship helps her to try to come to terms with her relationships with her mother, who has been so consumed with the tragedy of her son that she at one point forgets that she even has another child, and with her brother before it is too late.
The story is inspired by Chinn’s actual experiences, which she previously chronicled in the 2022 memoir Acne, which is a good thing because without that, it might strike viewers as the kind of amalgamation of disparate elements that only a Sundance festival programmer could actually buy into. The trouble with the film is that of all the various plot conflicts, the only one of them that seems to promise viewers something potentially unique and meaningful—the mother-daughter relationship that has grown so fraught as a result of their shared situation that they find themselves essentially driving each other away instead of coming together—is the one that ends up getting the short end of the narrative stick, despite the convincingly tense relationship that Parker and Linney are able to establish in their scenes together. Instead, far more time is dedicated to Doris trying to fit in with her new friends—even offering up her house as a party pad while her mom spends all her time at the hospice center—in scenes that follow the usual forgettable adolescent angst and the stuff between Doris and the widower, a mostly dubious thread that seems to exist only to work another name actor into the proceedings. None of this stuff works and only serves to distract from the more interesting and emotionally fraught material that should have been center stage. Suncoast has its moments, especially when Linney and Parker manage to rise above the material, but long before its almost unbelievable ending, even the most devout right-to-life viewers will be eager to pull the plug on it.