‘Everybody Wants to F*ck Me’ Review: Taron Egerton is a Dating Menace

The funniest moment in writer-director Jonathan Schey’s waggishly titled debut feature, Everybody Wants to F*ck Me, occurs within the first couple of scenes. After picking up a young woman played by Mia McKenna-Bruce in a crowded bar by positioning himself as her rescuer from a guy refusing to take the hint and buzz off, Taron Egerton’s seemingly wholesome Adam gets up the following morning and returns to the bedroom to present her with a perfect flat white. But he freezes in deal-breaker horror when she puts down the cup not on but next to a coaster. The obsessive neat freak beneath the easygoing surface of the virtue-signaling feminist ally might have made an amusing motif if it were ever referenced again.

But this dark comedy — which drops the asterisk from the title onscreen — that morphs into gender studies satire, morality tale, thriller and horror (of both the supernatural and body varieties) without ever settling definitively on one thing has no time for follow-through, because it’s too preoccupied with figuring out what kind of movie it wants to be. Does it have anything to say about the performative sensitivity of the predatory male on the 21st century dating scene? I couldn’t tell you, because it’s never coherent enough to make a point.

The first-look production shot of Egerton jogging through a London park wearing the kind of short running shorts that turned Colin Farrell and Paul Mescal into Important Gay Thirst Traps (congrats on those thighs, BTW) promised a much cheekier sense of humor. But this is a movie that’s rarely as funny as it seems to think it is.

Sure, there’s a drolly naughty brand of duplicity in Adam’s ruses to keep the flow of smart, attractive conquests coming — he has a poster for Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 on his bedroom wall; his cute little dog is named Alana, after the youngest Haim sister; he can get rapturous over Before Sunrise; he carries prop copies of novels by Edna O’Brien and Ottessa Moshfegh in his Mubi tote bag; he takes yoga classes; hangs out in the right coffee bars; and makes it a point in his women-run gallery job to recommend young female curators for new shows. It’s as if he’s done a course — How to Bed Women With Nonthreatening Behavior 101.

Adam may have convinced himself he’s a good guy and his commitment-phobia is merely a symptom of his tireless quest for the perfect relationship. Or is he completely cynical and calculating? Egerton’s all-in performance is shortchanged by the fact that Adam never has a sincere moment of self-interrogation, even after writing a book about what he describes as a “psychotic epidsode.”

His queer best friend Emma (Charly Clive) is the only person who calls him out on his bullshit; she refers to his hookup game as “romantic terrorism,” bouncing between love-bombing and gaslighting. He’s a voracious fuckboi masquerading as a tender-hearted softboi, who at one point will feel the need to defend himself with a giant silver inflatable penis.

In the meantime, Sofia (Jessica Henwick), a woman he approaches at the theater after a deadly-looking production of Oedipus — while making it clear that he’s “not the kind of guy who goes up to a girl in a bar” — instantly sees through him. She grabs his phone and scrolls through the stream of women he slept with and then ghosted. Putting way too much faith in his well-oiled charms, Adam is not scared off.

That applies even when Sofia takes him home to the industrial squat she shares with a bunch of sullen weirdos. He seems mildly disconcerted by a book she has lying around with etchings of priapic satyrs — male tricksters and sirens, representing men reduced to their basest instincts. Still, when Sofia turns dominatrix, ordering him to strip and repeat “I’m a bad boy and a piece of shit,” he complies. At least until she gives him something to smoke that knocks him out. He wakes up dazed and confused the next morning, with no idea what happened and no sign of Sofia.

Things are suddenly different, starting at work, where the gallery director confesses to noticing him for the first time and a punky feminist artist requests his involvement in her upcoming show. Even fluffy Alana looks at him strangely — in heat and vicious. When a freaky lesbian couple hit on him at the gallery opening, he unwisely goes home with them and narrowly escapes in one piece. A visit to his parents in search of comfort only makes things worse, when his mother starts exhibiting a Jocasta complex.

Adam interprets the itching rash that has spread across his crotch as another sign that he has been cursed, causing women to desire him in an almost feral way whenever he’s alone with them. He’s trapped in Obsession on acid.

It’s around this point that the movie careens off the rails and grows progressively more irritating. Fast. Adam becomes convinced the only way to reverse his condition is to return to Sofia’s place, where he finds a thick file on his sexual history and learns that female flies secrete toxic pheremones to neutralize dodgy males. It appears that the future of female liberation depends on experiments to shut down covert male predators using modifed fly DNA. You get the feeling that even David Cronenberg would be rolling his eyes by the time Adam discovers a massive lab full of buzzing specimens.

The movie spirals into full-blown horror hysteria but Schey doesn’t demonstrate the command or discipline to make the creeping dread in any way real or frightening or give all the postmodern smarty-pants piffle much meaning. The director instead aggressively piles on the extremely loud and abrasive music choices — enough with the ear-splitting blasts of Purcell — before jumping forward to a year later and a wholly unsatisfying ending that left me thinking, “What the f*ck did I just sit through?”