Who is the performative male, and what does he want? Native to Western Europe and North America, the performative male adopts the posture of taste—the right books (by women authors, of course), pants of appropriate width, ethically acceptable film subscription packages—but something appears off. The rice paper lantern in his apartment was chosen by the Instagram algorithm. His push broom mustache reads a little too ironic. He is, when it comes down to it, a two-faced Janus who’ll get a girl’s hopes up and then dash them in therapy speak.
Adam, played by a delightfully committed Taron Egerton in Jonathan Schey’s debut feature, Everybody Wants to Fuck Me, is a perfect example of the performative male. His bookshelf includes Perfection, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and The Country Girls. He practices yoga, works as an associate at a female-run gallery in London, and will fuck you gently (after getting verbal consent) while his Agnès Varda poster looks on pensively. He signals emotional availability to the cute girls he meets at the cafe and the bookstore, but by morning, he’s forgotten why. He’s not in the headspace for a relationship right now. He just needs some time to be by himself.
One night, at a buzzy staging of Oedipus Rex, Adam and his best friend from university, the safely sapphic Emma (comedian Charly Clive) encounter a mysterious woman sitting alone at the bar. Sofia (Jessica Henwick) is a classics major, stunning, and, unlike his other conquests, completely unwilling to buy into Adam’s bullshit, playfully eviscerating the pints of Guinness and non-threatening puppy pics on his Hinge profile. (The scene was inspired by the time Schey’s friend, comedian Mary Beth Barone, dragged his own dating profile at one of her shows.) “These men don’t like women,” Sofia says, scrolling. “They just want women to like them.” Still, she is willing to take him back to her apartment, which is part bohemian commune, part wrong turn in the chemistry building.
What starts as kinky foreplay between the two of them (“I’m down for anything as long as there’s communication,” Adam thoughtfully asserts) blurs into a blackout. When he wakes up, Adam finds that a sneaking suspicion he’s had all his life has just come true: every woman, from the lady jogging in the park to his gallery director, wants to sleep with him. Thus begins a blown-up version of last year’s TIFF breakout (and the film festival’s biggest success story of all time), Obsession, in which male anxieties about dating, “needy” women, and consent play out in a horror-inflected comedy of increasingly cringey proportions.
As with Obsession and The Substance before it, Everybody Wants to Fuck Me, which premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, is primarily concerned with the politics of desire in a post-Me Too moment and the lengths to which some people will go to preserve their social capital. Adam, at least in his mind, lives in the shadow of Reuben (Herbert Nordrum), the successful performer starring as Oedipus whose sonorous voice and imposing height mean he can have a gorgeous wife and still find time to fuck the actor playing Oedipus’s mother on the side.
So, at first, he takes his curse as a blessing, a way to catch up to Reuben’s Übermensch cool. The brusque German feminist artist showing at his gallery softens in Adam’s presence, and the show’s curator doesn’t even mind when the director delegates some of her authority to him. But, as with all wish-fulfillment fantasies, things quickly spiral out of control—and into the kind of bacchanalian chaos usually reserved for Greek myth. (Those who found Obsession to be a little too gory will be happy to hear that the quease-factor is much lower in Everybody Wants to Fuck Me.)
At its strongest moments, the movie shares more DNA with The Substance than Obsession in its preoccupation with how exhausting it is to remain desirable. Like Demi Moore’s protagonist in The Substance, Adam cultivates a deep need for attention and validation—one that ends up eclipsing any real opportunity for human connection. The movie is less interested in the ways that men and women do or don’t connect than the limitations of a certain archetype. Adam, like Robert Pattinson’s character in The Drama earlier this year, all the way down to their art gallery bona fides, collects women like any other status symbol; but while the former film assiduously drills down into the particulars of thought vs. action, Everybody Wants to Fuck Me stops short of accessing Adam’s deeper motivations.
In the deluge of “social issue thrillers” that arrived after the smash success of Get Out over a decade ago, Everybody Wants to Fuck Me is mostly successful, while others like Him, Companion, and Don’t Worry Darling have fallen flat. It’s a testament to Schey’s confidence as a first-time director and to his keen observation of the way in which, as women have grown more emboldened to publicly air their grievances with a culture of ambient sexual predation, Millennial men have, in turn, started to view women as potentially dangerous in their own way.
In the world of the film, there is something irreconcilable within Adam, and perhaps with all relationships between men and women. (The only happy relationship shown is between two lesbians in their 30s, who are preparing to raise a family while Adam is still on the prowl like he’s 22.) The movie is ultimately less interested in providing any path forward through this heteropessimistic antagonism than waving its red flags—Mubi tote bag and all.
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