Everybody Wants to F*ck Me review – Taron Egerton is hounded in sharp-toothed dating nightmare

4 hours ago 9

Everyone knows an Adam. He’s not like those other guys, the ones who won’t take no for an answer and speak lasciviously about women to their mates. He’s doing the work, listening to and uplifting female voices, working at an all-female gallery while being constantly aware of his cis white male privilege. He has a Mubi tote bag, reads Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl in Hackney cafes, has a poster of Cléo from 5 to 7 in his apartment and has even named his dog after his favourite Haim sister. He is … a nice guy.

In first-time writer-director Jonathan Schey’s canny debut Everybody Wants to Fuck Me, Adam is also a fraud.

He’s played by Taron Egerton, someone who has recently been finding his footing as an adult actor, whether as more conventional lead of Netflix’s excellent B-movie thriller Carry-On or as the less expected gonzo villain of Netflix’s mid B-movie thriller Apex. But freed from streaming shackles (he’s also led two Apple dramas, one of which I genuinely don’t think anyone knows exists), he’s able to show just how much more he can do in edgier, stranger territory and how far he’s willing to go without blinking. Turns out, pretty far.

In a swiftly revealing cold open, we see Adam in a note-perfect meet-cute with Mia McKenna-Bruce’s unsuspecting Londoner. They dance to Troye Sivan (ally!), discuss their love for Before Sunset and, despite him not obviously pushing for it, they have sex back at his place. But the morning after, despite telling her he’s “obsessed” mid-thrust and despite making leaf art in her flat white, something is off. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s put her artisanal mug on the nightstand without a coaster or maybe it’s just because he’s in a “bojangled headspace” or maybe it’s because he does this all the time.

His exhausted gay best friend Emma (Rooster’s Charly Clive, incredibly charming) accuses him of “romantic terrorism”, but rolling her eyes and gently jabbing him is part of their learned shtick as is her allowing him to cut their night out short when he spots an attractive woman at the theatre bar. Adam tries his luck with Sofia (Jessica Henwick), who sees through his performance, poking fun at his dating profile and his many, many matches left on read. But still, she seems interested and invites him back to her place …

Something happens that night, the specifics of which we’re unsure of, like Adam. After a quick smoke, he’s knocked unconscious and he wakes to find Sofia gone. He chalks it up to yet another one-night stand but something has shifted not in him but in the world around him. Adam was never exactly struggling for female attention but there’s a new, more aggressive intensity to it with women staring at him on the tube and colleagues laughing a little too hard at his mediocre jokes. For a while, Adam makes the most of it, his door revolving that much more than usual but the sweetness begins to sour as he realises there’s something more sinister going on when even his dog Alana starts giving him the eye.

There are elements here of last year’s Toronto breakout Obsession but we’re more firmly in the recently familiar, and increasingly exhausting, land of the “social thriller”, although wisely with more (genuinely funny) comedy than this often overly self-serious subgenre has entertained for a while. The post-Get Out surge has been far more miss than hit and while this is a smarter and sharper addition (a crude sell would be Get Out meets the viral Shitty Media Men list of 2017), it does still grapple with some recurring issues, especially as the last-act explanation rears its head. To Schey’s credit, he does a better job than most (the bar has been set low by the maddening stupidity of both Blink Twice and Don’t Worry Darling) and finds the right balance of serious to silly, but the film is reliant on a poorly thought through convenience that pushed me a little too far out. Schey also leans on a last-scene trope that ranks among my least favourite ways to end a movie, right next to a character asking another “what now?” as credits fade.

But he mostly gets a lot right, both as writer and director, a not-to-be-sniffed-at achievement for a first-timer given how many tend to only convince while wearing one of those hats. The target here is so easy to so many of us (last year even saw a performative male contest in Washington Square Park), but Schey works at making Adam a real person rather than a meme to be simply ridiculed. He doesn’t turn Adam into a full-throated bad guy but also manages to avoid softening who he really is, and even as we follow his descent right alongside him, Schey skirts falling back on uneasy “you can’t say anything any more!” frustration especially during a cleverly telling spiral speech (Adam complains how “exhausting” it is to be nice). So much is also down to Egerton, who delivers a fearless, full-on performance, scarily believable as both the guy who would politely and ethically get you into bed and also the one who would coldly suggest you leave the morning after, and he shows himself to be a more specifically funny and understated comedy actor than he’s been given credit for.

It comes from Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap production company, also behind the not dissimilar Promising Young Woman, but it rights so many of that film’s many wrongs, from an increase in emotional maturity to an improved aesthetic (this takes place in real, breathing, stylishly captured London, not a bright and tinny approximation of a 2000s Sundance indie) but most prominently in its willingness to bear and use its teeth to draw blood. If that film was a tease then this one isn’t scared to go all the way.