Jonathan Schey’s dark comedy thriller Everybody Wants to F*ck Me is another movie with a very familiar premise: men are awful. The more interesting problem marking the film is what it seems to think about the women who fall for them.

Taron Egerton plays Adam Samuels, an art gallerist whose personality is assembled from things women are supposed to like. He reads feminist books, carries a Mubi totebag, and names his dog Alana Haim. At work, he lets his all-female colleagues take charge, then follows this gesture by masturbating to a picture of one of them in the bathroom.

When Adam sleeps with women, his M.O. is to decide he is not in the right headspace for anything long-term after the sex is over. “I don’t think we’re meant to be” is his standard post-coital exit strategy. He isn’t violent or particularly cruel, but he is sleazy. Egerton gives Adam enough charm to see why women sleep with him, yet enough patheticness to see why he needs to believe he is a nice guy. The film is very clear about what is wrong with Adam. What becomes less clear is why his brand of sleaze requires the kind of intervention the movie eventually gives him. 

Then Adam meets Sofia (Jessica Henwick), a student who immediately clocks his entire performance. In one conversation, she lays out exactly what she thinks Adam is doing. The idea that some people perform sensitivity because it gets them laid is hardly buried in contemporary social knowledge. Still, this first stretch works because Adam has learned how to make his selfishness look considerate. 

Then Sofia drugs him, summons a curse, and the movie gets its title.

Every woman around Adam suddenly wants him, including his mother. At first it is flattering, then invasive, then violent. His paranoia becomes increasingly justified, even as everyone around him berates him for his outbursts. But the consequences never really catch up to him. I kept waiting for the premise to push Adam into a situation where he could no longer rely on his charm or carefully constructed image to protect him. 

The horror never really escalates beyond women wanting to attack Adam. The women are terrifying in theory, but the film keeps finding ways to make them less threatening in practice. That would be easier to forgive if Sofia’s solution to Adam were more interesting. 

Sofia eventually reveals that she has developed a substance that can override women’s desire. She has turned her grievance with men like Adam into a biological weapon. More importantly, she is chemically manipulating women’s attraction and repulsion without their consent. Their bodies become the mechanism of her revenge, regardless of whether they would actually choose to sleep with Adam or reject another man. In that sense, the substance starts to resemble an inverted date-rape drug. The issue is that the film gives Sofia’s grievance far more consideration than it gives the women affected by her solution.

Sofia could have been the movie’s villain. She is taking a history of bad experiences and projecting it onto an entire category of men. Adam certainly chose the wrong woman to fuck with, but the film treats Sofia as though she has figured out the solution to the problem. Her anger is validated, while the consequences of her intervention on the women around her are barely considered. 

That choice makes the film’s gender politics considerably less interesting. Adam manufactures an entire personality to get women into bed, but Everybody Wants to F*ck Me treats this behaviour as though it requires a solution far more extreme than the problem it has actually presented. Adam is a selfish guy who lies about wanting relationships. He is not shown as a violent predator. The movie can make fun of him without pretending that the women around him need saving from their own inability to recognize him.

This is where the film’s feminism starts to feel patronizing. There is an assumption underneath it that women are being tricked by men like Adam, as if women are incapable of recognizing the difference between a man who genuinely likes them and one who has read the right feminist book before taking them home. The film leaves very little room for women who recognize what Adam is doing and choose to sleep with him anyway.

This blatant “fuck all men” narrative starts to feel infantilizing as a woman. The women in the movie largely function as people whose desire can be manipulated around Adam, rather than people making nuanced decisions of their own. Dating is more complex than the film’s moral framework allows it to be. 

Towards the end, Adam hilariously writes a book about his experience as its victim. There is a fascinating dilemma here because Sofia can be completely justified in being furious with Adam while the film can still mishandle the women around him. The problem is that the film seems to want us to agree with Sofia without examining what she has done to the women she claims to be protecting. 

Everybody Wants to F*ck Me is funny, sometimes very funny, and Egerton is good enough to make the whole thing more entertaining than not. But underneath all that, the promised ‘horrors’ of modern dating are rarely effective, and the film’s biggest idea eventually collapses into a lesson about bad men that it spent most of its first act explaining. Its idea of feminism ends up doing something equally frustrating: telling women what they should want, who they should reject, and why they cannot be trusted to make those choices themselves.