‘Everybody Wants to F*ck Me’ Review: Taron Egerton Does ‘Obsession’ to Every Woman on Earth in Cynical Horror Comedy That Trips Over Its Dick

TIFF: A London soft boi gets cursed with his ultimate fantasy in a scattered movie that shares his fear of commitment.

Much like the soft boi archetype that it takes behind the woodshed for a dirty little beating, Jonathan Schey’s “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” — its amusing title presented on screen without the asterisk — presents itself as a thoughtful and complex piece of work. Alternately, and sometimes all at once, the movie is a straightforward gender comedy about 21st century dating, a high-concept “What Women Want” riff about a chauvinist who gets the tables turned on his penchant for objectification, a monkey’s paw morality play in which a hapless lad does “Obsession” to every creature on Earth with XX chromosomes (including dogs, insects, and even his own mother), and, last and kind of least, a half-interested ethnography about the relationship between social maturity and biological imperatives in the post-Apatowian manchild. 

Alas, much like its manwhore protagonist, Schey’s debut feature is — for all of its postmodern fun — ultimately a lot more base and basic than it presents on the surface. At the end of the day, it just wants to get you into bed with a nice smile, a few irresistible references (the guy has a “Cleo from 5 to 7” poster in his bedroom and a pup named after Alana Haim!), and some empty promises of follow-through so that you’ll fall under the spell of its DCP for a night. The moment you start to get invested, this movie is already thinking about its next conquest; it flits between genres with the same cynicism that its hero wears a MUBI tote bag and “reads” Ottessa Moshfegh novels at his local cafe as bait, compulsively performing what it thinks we want to see in order to mask its (valid) fear that it doesn’t have anything of value to show us. 

At least that’s one way of demystifying why its protagonist would sooner spend a night with half the women in London than sleep with any of them twice, but at no point in “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” does Adam Samuels — played by a very game Taron Egerton, his performance impressively sympathetic even at its most shit-eating and vice-versa — make a serious attempt to understand why he’s so addicted to fucking them.

Is it because millennia of evolution have hard-wired him to spread his seed? Is it because he’s been socially conditioned to measure his value by the notches on his bedpost? Because he’s afraid of commitment and potentially ending up like his parents, or maybe because he’s a sadist who gets off on making girls feel stupid as he passive-aggressively shoos them out of his flat in the morning? None of these things are mutually exclusive, of course, but Schey would prefer not pin his movie on any one of them, if only to avoid ruling out any of the others. 

Whatever the case, Adam wants to fuck everyone before everyone wants to fuck him, and so he sets traps on dating apps and prowls the London nightclubs like a predator who’s so well-disguised that he can’t even see himself for what he is. After getting what he wants, he leaves his prey in the lurch by claiming that he’s in too much of a “bojangled headspace” to date right now. 

Of course, one of the more cutting ironies of Schey’s film is that Adam — in stark contrast to Bear in “Obsession” — could basically land anyone he wanted to without resorting to the whole “nice guy” routine. He’s got a quick wit, an assistant job at a prestigious gallery (women-run, of course), and a square jaw that makes him look a little like a movie star version of a young Elton John if you squint, but he’d rather fool his prey by waxing poetic about “Before Sunrise” than admit to the primitive nature of his intentions. His lesbian best friend Emma (Charly Clive) is the only person who sees Adam for what he is, but she’s happy enough to be his wingman — with her partner seven months pregnant and her life speeding towards permanent domesticity, it’s possible that she gets a vicarious thrill from hearing about Adam’s conquests, even if her reaction to them is usually couched in an eye-roll. 

One night, after catching a performance of “Oedipus Rex” and unctuously chatting up its pretentious star after the show (a sexist piece of shit so unrepentant that he allows men like Adam to feel good about themselves by comparison, even if Adam is desperate to be his friend), our hero spots a bookish and beautiful grad student reading alone at the theater bar. Her name is Sofia (the always compelling Jessica Henwick), and she sees right through Adam’s whole schtick. Still, that doesn’t stop her from taking him back to her cult-like house share on the dark edge of town, where he leafs through books about big-dicked Satyrs and smokes a drug that’s much stronger than he realizes. The next thing he knows, Sofia is AWOL, his crotch is scratchy, and every woman he meets goes completely feral the moment they’re alone together. 

“Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” has a good time with this part of its conceit, even if Schey is smartly reluctant to overindulge in the wish-fulfillment of it all — it’s fun enough to watch a charismatic movie star debase himself in order to sleep with as many people as he can, but much less so to watch a man have sex with women who are literally, perhaps even supernaturally powerless to resist him. The most effective parts of the movie play that dynamic for laughs, and later for scares, by framing it as a gender-reversal that sees Adam subject to the same aggressive and potentially unsafe attention that women receive from men just for existing in the world. 

It’s all pretty privilege when his co-workers start giggling at everything he says and his boss puts him up for a promotion he doesn’t deserve, but such perks sour fast when Adam is targeted on the Tube by an older woman, or cornered by a colleague in the office bathroom (whose plainly unnatural lust for him is too frightening to enjoy). “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” does a much better job of escalating its premise than it does of deepening it, but there’s a visceral impact to the way it visualizes how witnesses are often the only distinction between a “nice guy” and a sexual predator. 

Adam isn’t a rapist, but he is a serial drain on every woman who falls under his spell, and the most consistent subject of this movie’s attention is the way that his performative bullshit is a grievous waste of everyone’s time — including his own. Every minute his one-night stands have spent waiting for him to message them back, and every ounce of energy they’ve poured into his little white lies about how much he likes them, is time they could have been investing in themselves. Now that it’s frowned upon to diminish women in the workplace, Schey suggests, men can only retain the upper hand by dicking women around in the dating game. 

In that respect, it’s fair comeuppance that Adam’s personal and professional lives are completely upended by the sudden fact that, well, everybody wants to fuck him. But as the curse grows stronger, and the women in Adam’s proximity are no longer content with simply tasting his flesh, the film’s mushrooming plot mechanics — its pathological drive to keep raising the stakes without meaningfully forcing Adam to confront his own behavior — start to outpace its appetite for social commentary. 

While Schey isn’t afraid of a jump-scare, and he displays a solid aptitude for iterating on the omnipresent sex terror of “It Follows,” his script is neither secure enough in its ideas to push the envelope past a few cringe-worthy moments (the bit with Adam’s mother… fair play), nor interested enough in its characters to fall back on their personal drama. Adam’s friendship with Emma is just a means to an end, his work crisis becomes a belabored set-up for the movie’s climactic setpiece, and the overlap between his sluttiness and his parallel habit for social climbing penchant is never explored beyond the errant observation that — to paraphrase Jia Tolentino’s “Trick Mirror,” the kind of book Adam might use as a prop to get laid — modern personhood will seamlessly readjust itself around whatever within it might sell. 

That last point makes the best case for itself in the film’s punchline of a final scene, which cheekily ends by suggesting that “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” is even more in on the joke than it’s let on to that point — that it wasn’t honestly exploring any of its social motifs so much as it was using them to coerce us into spending a night with it. There’s a self-reflexive sting to how Schey leaves his movie open to the same cynicism its protagonist is tasked with leaving behind, but that only goes so far. After all, Adam’s saving grace, his last sliver of innocence, is that he can’t explain what motivates him to waste everybody’s time. Despite putting us in an enjoyably bojangled headspace on occasion, “Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” ends by denying itself the same excuse.

Grade: C

“Everybody Wants to Fuck Me” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.