Better loving through chemistry
You wouldn't notice it without looking at the poster, but the title of Hulu's new teen romantic comedy Sex Appeal is meant to be a pun. Sex APPeal. Like... an app. About sex. It's actually quite fitting, because the movie is exactly like its title, in that it's something totally misguided and off-base that through the power of sheer accident manages to land somewhere in the realm of something generic and pleasantly bland.
The plot structure is barbarically predictable, because romantic comedies and especially teen sex comedies have been scraping the barrel on plot ideas since about 1998 (that is, until Hollywood finally starts adapting the pile of K-pop novels about a member of an off-brand BTS who totally thinks you're really cute and also a good singer). However, everything that hangs on that structure is... just a little odd. Avery (Mika Abdalla) is a young, science-obsessed woman at the top of the academic food chain who has long been running experiments on her best friend Larson (Jake Short), who is not quite as IQ-laden.
Every year she participates in a huge science event called STEMCON, and started dating her co-champion Casper (Mason Versaw). This year's assignment is to create an app that solves a personal problem. She has "optimized her life" to avoid having anything as petty as human problems, but when Casper says he's DTF (he helpfully explains that this means "down to fuck" in case anyone born before 1986 accidentally clicked play on the movie) she realizes that, being a virgin, she can't be perfect at sex like she is at everything else. She decides to gather data for an AI app designed to help the user have good sex, and gather data from Larson, with whom she arranges a daily afterschool hookup. She will then compile all this data and blow Casper's mind when STEMCON comes around in 33 days (we learn about this ticking clock from a desperately unnecessary "let me tell you how I ended up here" intro that actively makes the rest of the film less interesting because we know it will end with her... giving a presentation? Why am I meant to wonder how she ended up there?)
She assumes that this experiment is coming from an entirely rational place despite Larson's assertions that love and sex aren't always as separate as she thinks and also his extremely obvious long-term crush on her. This is helped by the fact that Avery is a Patrick Bateman-level sociopath.
I really don't want to get into the questionable sexual politics of this movie because that's boring and they're really pretty toothless when all is said and done. Just know that Sex Appeal is basically what happens if No Strings Attached and The To Do List had a baby and that baby was Young Sheldon. What I'm more frustrated by is this film's completely unhinged Movie Science.
I'm not even talking about the fact that somehow Avery doesn't realize that no conference program for high schoolers would ever let her submit this project. This "app" that she creates at first seems to just be an engine for spitting out search keywords. In its final form, it's something to which you ask "how do I have good sex?" whereupon it plays a recording answering that one question. That's not an app. That's a Teddy Ruxpin.
The only thing the film understands even less than science is science nerds. Avery's surface-level obsession with Star Trek reads worse than any gag on The Big Bang Theory, but then she has to go ahead and explain that while she and Casper have never had sex, they have kissed and had "braingasms." If this is meant to be a "joke," it's certainly not funny by any human metric and also I'm very worried about her.
The one truly interesting thing about Sex Appeal that ends up anywhere close to the realm of "this is good and I like it" is the way it abstracts her sexual experiences into a sort of dream space. Obviously, this is born from the fact that you can't just show teenagers boning, even on Hulu. But it's a stylistic fillip that is doing something genuinely interesting even if it can't quite keep a handle on its metaphors (orgasming as represented by a subpar Busby Berkeley pool number pastiche is one thing, fingering being depicted as a boy in a construction helmet running around rubbing columns and doorways in a pink hall is... not).
Also, the film changes to a larger aspect ratio whenever these fantasies occur, which tells me that these filmmakers actually had something on their mind other than presenting the script in the flattest, brightest way possible, which is the defense mechanism employed by most Netflix rom-com filmmakers. They actually also vary the aspect ratio during flashback sequences, but that's a much more common technique and unless Avery's childhood was recorded on a Super 8 camera in 2012, it doesn't make much sense.
At the end of the day, it fails to be a particularly funny film, but the cast does have an unshakeable charisma that ends up getting you across the finish line regardless. Abdalla and Short are excellently matched, and her delivery of voiceover especially heightens the moments when she is an unreliable narrator. These are the best-written lines in the entire script, and they speak volumes about the dichotomy between Avery's rational and emotional selves in a way that is at least glancing at subtle.
Likewise, the film is packed with cameos from adult actors who had nothing better to do that weekend. Avery's parents are a lesbian throuple played, in order of narrative importance, by Fortune Feimster, Margaret Cho, and Rebecca Henderson. Although Henderson is the only actress here who I didn't know beforehand, she not only holds her own but steals quite a few scenes. From Margaret Cho. There is also a heap of overtalented TV performers on hand to play teachers: Artemis Pebdani is heavily featured because she has proven chops, but Tate Hanyok and Hayden Szeto both make the most of their 15 seconds of screentime apiece: for my money, Hanyok delivers the one line that actually earns a laugh, with Rebecca Henderson in a close second place.
The bottom line is, maybe my brain is mush from watching too many of these things, but Sex Appeal is insipid but perfectly pleasant. I can't conceive of a single reason to recommend anybody see the film, but if one has an insatiable thirst for teen films that the Netflix library can't fully satisfy, this one is a wholly adequate way to quench that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The plot structure is barbarically predictable, because romantic comedies and especially teen sex comedies have been scraping the barrel on plot ideas since about 1998 (that is, until Hollywood finally starts adapting the pile of K-pop novels about a member of an off-brand BTS who totally thinks you're really cute and also a good singer). However, everything that hangs on that structure is... just a little odd. Avery (Mika Abdalla) is a young, science-obsessed woman at the top of the academic food chain who has long been running experiments on her best friend Larson (Jake Short), who is not quite as IQ-laden.
Every year she participates in a huge science event called STEMCON, and started dating her co-champion Casper (Mason Versaw). This year's assignment is to create an app that solves a personal problem. She has "optimized her life" to avoid having anything as petty as human problems, but when Casper says he's DTF (he helpfully explains that this means "down to fuck" in case anyone born before 1986 accidentally clicked play on the movie) she realizes that, being a virgin, she can't be perfect at sex like she is at everything else. She decides to gather data for an AI app designed to help the user have good sex, and gather data from Larson, with whom she arranges a daily afterschool hookup. She will then compile all this data and blow Casper's mind when STEMCON comes around in 33 days (we learn about this ticking clock from a desperately unnecessary "let me tell you how I ended up here" intro that actively makes the rest of the film less interesting because we know it will end with her... giving a presentation? Why am I meant to wonder how she ended up there?)
She assumes that this experiment is coming from an entirely rational place despite Larson's assertions that love and sex aren't always as separate as she thinks and also his extremely obvious long-term crush on her. This is helped by the fact that Avery is a Patrick Bateman-level sociopath.
I really don't want to get into the questionable sexual politics of this movie because that's boring and they're really pretty toothless when all is said and done. Just know that Sex Appeal is basically what happens if No Strings Attached and The To Do List had a baby and that baby was Young Sheldon. What I'm more frustrated by is this film's completely unhinged Movie Science.
I'm not even talking about the fact that somehow Avery doesn't realize that no conference program for high schoolers would ever let her submit this project. This "app" that she creates at first seems to just be an engine for spitting out search keywords. In its final form, it's something to which you ask "how do I have good sex?" whereupon it plays a recording answering that one question. That's not an app. That's a Teddy Ruxpin.
The only thing the film understands even less than science is science nerds. Avery's surface-level obsession with Star Trek reads worse than any gag on The Big Bang Theory, but then she has to go ahead and explain that while she and Casper have never had sex, they have kissed and had "braingasms." If this is meant to be a "joke," it's certainly not funny by any human metric and also I'm very worried about her.
The one truly interesting thing about Sex Appeal that ends up anywhere close to the realm of "this is good and I like it" is the way it abstracts her sexual experiences into a sort of dream space. Obviously, this is born from the fact that you can't just show teenagers boning, even on Hulu. But it's a stylistic fillip that is doing something genuinely interesting even if it can't quite keep a handle on its metaphors (orgasming as represented by a subpar Busby Berkeley pool number pastiche is one thing, fingering being depicted as a boy in a construction helmet running around rubbing columns and doorways in a pink hall is... not).
Also, the film changes to a larger aspect ratio whenever these fantasies occur, which tells me that these filmmakers actually had something on their mind other than presenting the script in the flattest, brightest way possible, which is the defense mechanism employed by most Netflix rom-com filmmakers. They actually also vary the aspect ratio during flashback sequences, but that's a much more common technique and unless Avery's childhood was recorded on a Super 8 camera in 2012, it doesn't make much sense.
At the end of the day, it fails to be a particularly funny film, but the cast does have an unshakeable charisma that ends up getting you across the finish line regardless. Abdalla and Short are excellently matched, and her delivery of voiceover especially heightens the moments when she is an unreliable narrator. These are the best-written lines in the entire script, and they speak volumes about the dichotomy between Avery's rational and emotional selves in a way that is at least glancing at subtle.
Likewise, the film is packed with cameos from adult actors who had nothing better to do that weekend. Avery's parents are a lesbian throuple played, in order of narrative importance, by Fortune Feimster, Margaret Cho, and Rebecca Henderson. Although Henderson is the only actress here who I didn't know beforehand, she not only holds her own but steals quite a few scenes. From Margaret Cho. There is also a heap of overtalented TV performers on hand to play teachers: Artemis Pebdani is heavily featured because she has proven chops, but Tate Hanyok and Hayden Szeto both make the most of their 15 seconds of screentime apiece: for my money, Hanyok delivers the one line that actually earns a laugh, with Rebecca Henderson in a close second place.
The bottom line is, maybe my brain is mush from watching too many of these things, but Sex Appeal is insipid but perfectly pleasant. I can't conceive of a single reason to recommend anybody see the film, but if one has an insatiable thirst for teen films that the Netflix library can't fully satisfy, this one is a wholly adequate way to quench that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: teen movies
