Mark Reviews Movies: SEX APPEAL (2022)

Sex Appeal, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 13, 2022

The protagonist of Sex Appeal is the sort of character who seems specifically tailored for the gimmick, the story, and the humor of the movie in which she stars. This isn't to say that some people out there in the real world don't think and talk like Avery (Mika Abdalla), a teenage overachiever and perfectionist who doesn't care for and has difficulty understanding the ins and outs of social interaction. There are plenty of people like that, for sure, and surely, the notions of romance and sex are going to present some kind of challenge for them. For Avery, though, the challenges are many. The solutions are merely a problem to be solved, and the attention she gives that process is all-consuming.

None of it quite adds up for this character, unless, of course, she's the central figure in a teenage sex comedy. Avery is in that role, obviously, so sex—specifically her first time—overwhelms every other part of the character's life. All of the work she has been doing in high school, all of the optimism that comes with having a full ride to the elite educational institution of her choosing, and all of the dreams she might have for her career go out the window.

Just like that, Avery goes from intelligent, kind of apathetic, and a bit of a loner to wholly naïve, genuinely anxious, and rather open. Sex can do some of that to a person, but apparently, being the star of a sex comedy means that nothing else matters—no matter how much so many other things may matter before the very thought of sex enters into the character's brain.

In terms of what we see of and learn about Avery at the start, the premise of the screenplay by Tate Hanyok is tough to accept. In its lead character, here is a young woman who possesses more knowledge than all of her peers and has already achieved more in less than two decades of life than some of them may accomplish in the decades that follow. She doesn't care about popularity or friendship or what anyone might think of her (The weird thing is that Avery isn't an outsider, as most of this suggests, since her classmates respect her enough to freely discuss some rather intimate and embarrassing things about their sexuality, but as that's part of the story's gimmick, we apparently have to accept it).

With college lined up, the only thing left in Avery's time in high school is to once again win a national STEM competition. This year's challenge is to create a mobile application that can help a participant with a personal problem. Since Avery has spent years seeking perfection, she doesn't have any personal problems. That is until her long-distance boyfriend Casper (Mason Versaw) tells Avery that he wants to have sex with her when they meet at the competition.

Somehow, Avery knows almost nothing about sex (She has three mothers, which is pretty much played as a conveniently inconvenient gag, given the circumstances). This gives her a personal problem for which to make an app, so she builds an artificial intelligence to search the internet, collate information from interviews with her classmates, and figure out how to have perfect sex. To put the theories into practice, she enlists the aid of her long-time friend Larson (Jake Short), who once had—and may still have—a crush on Avery, for the more hands-on experimentation.

Beyond the contradictory main character, the movie itself, directed by Talia Osteen, is a bundle of contradictions when it comes to its examination, exploration, and portrayal of sex. To be sure, the script is frank about all sorts of matters, from foreplay to masturbation—even if a lot of the talk about such things is filled with innuendo and other sorts of attempted comedy.

The whole of the setup and story is, of course, a joke. A bit too much of the humor, though, feels like a dishonest evasion tactic on the filmmakers' part. That's not only in the ways sex is talked about here, in roundabout and flippant ways (There's a particularly lengthy and pointless scene in which a classroom of students get a teacher to make a suggestive graph on the board, while a student brings herself to orgasm in the back row).

It's also in how Avery's own experiences, on her own or with Larson, are presented as fantasy sequences—a synchronized swimming routine, Larson as a construction worker in a long pink hallway, a fountain of erupting water. The stylization is intended, perhaps, to show Avery's move from seeing sex as a challenging intellectual problem to seeing it as something more emotional. It comes across as phony sentimentality, nonetheless.

Abdalla is charming enough that Avery isn't—as her inconsistencies could have made her—annoying, and by the end, the most obvious developments—how the character really feels about Casper and Larson—aren't taken to their most obvious ends. There's a bit of wisdom in the third act of Sex Appeal, although it's also a bit too trite to make up for the movie's other shortcomings.

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