Everyone Wants to F*ck Me (TIFF) Review: Taron Egerton Is Excellent in a Twisted, Uncomfortable Anti-Rom-Com

PLOT: A caddish ladies’ man (Taron Egerton) finds himself suddenly irresistible to women, with them unable to control themselves when they are alone with him. What begins as a fantasy turns into a nightmare…

REVIEW: Everyone Wants to F*ck Me has a premise that seems tailor-made for a rom-com, but despite the trappings of the genre, which include an (initially) affable lead, a uniformly young and attractive cast, and picturesque London visuals, once the movie gets going, it turns into something quite different. It’s like a nightmarish version of a Working Title film, and perhaps the greatest role someone like Hugh Grant or Colin Firth never played during their heydays, when they were the de facto giants of the British rom-com.

Nevertheless, Egerton is an excellent choice. Handsome in a kind of non-threatening way, with charm and an easygoing manner, he comes off as a nice guy. He’s non-threatening enough that his character, Adam, is employed at a female-run art gallery, where he’s the only male employee. Everyone likes him, and he’s respectful—as far as they know—even if no one knows he often pops off to the bathroom to rub one out while looking at photos of some of his colleagues. You see, Adam is obsessed with scoring with women, and thanks to his good looks and personality, he’s an ultra-successful ladies’ man. Yet, his tactics are a bit shallow, with him using the dreaded love bombing to lure women in, only to blow them off with excuses once he’s slept with them (“I’m in the wrong headspace” is his go-to excuse).

Yet, something happens to Adam when he hooks up with a Classics graduate student, Sofia (Jessica Henwick), who lures him back to her student commune and gives him some weed that knocks him out. The next morning, Sofia is gone, and suddenly women are all over him, including gay women, his colleagues, a man-hating artist with a new showcase at his gallery, and—to his dismay—even his pet dog.

I definitely had writer-director Jonathan Schey’s film wrongly pegged at the start. The first half hour plays out like a straight comedy, with it seeming like Adam’s going to get his comeuppance and turn into a nice guy. It’s not as simple as that. Adam, who is obsessed with arthouse films (he walks around with a Mubi bag always present), suddenly starts to feel like the anti-hero in a Nicolas Roeg movie as he becomes prey to be violated, with the film somewhat thematically similar to Curry Barker’s Obsession (even if it never quite goes all the way into genre territory).

Egerton is great as Adam, who is initially charming but becomes more pathetic as the pressure of his situation reveals his true colors and the depths of his own self-obsession. Yet, the film takes a novel look at what it means to be victimized, with Adam himself prey to Henwick’s Sofia, who he knows has done something to him, even if he’s not quite sure what it is. She despises men like him, who use their charm to use and discard women, but she herself sees him as something less than human.

Yet, it’s all done in an easy-to-digest way, with Schey keeping the pace bouncy at only ninety minutes and filling the movie with nice London locations, including a nice tour of London café culture—the places Adam favours for meeting women—and the arthouse scene. It certainly has a message embedded for a certain kind of man within its running time, and I walked out of it more self-reflective than I anticipated. Yet, it never felt like I was being bludgeoned, with the film remaining bouncy, entertaining, and uncomfortably hilarious at times. It’s the kind of film that seems bound to start some interesting conversations, and Egerton, who’s been on a great roll lately with Apex and She Rides Shotgun, has another excellent showcase.

Taron Egerton

GOOD

7

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