‘How to Have Sex’ and ‘Fitting In’: Fine coming of age movies by directors named Molly

Young women’s sexuality reaches the forefront in a pair of new films

There have been quite a few movies so far in 2024 consisting of female filmmakers dealing with the subject of young women’s sexuality. Last month, there was Jade Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl, with Jenna Ortega and Gideon Adlon as teens trying to seduce their teachers, while next week will see Lisa Frankenstein, Zelda Williams, and Diablo Cody’s story of a high school senior (Kathryn Newton) finding love with a male zombie. Next month also arrives Drive Away Dolls which, while about 20-somethings, is way more about dildos than you probably expected. 

This week, there are two more entries, both directed by female directors named “Molly,” in the form of Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex and Molly McGlynn’s Fitting In. They’re a bit different from each other in focus and presentation, but both are winning efforts. 

How to Have Sex, which debuted at Cannes last year, comes across at first like a British version of Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, although it ultimately goes off in a very different direction.

A trio of English sixteen-year-olds head out “on holiday” (as they call it over there) to a Greek isle, where the plan is to party, get drunk, and hook up. Between the accents and the drinking, the film at times resembles Absolutely Fabulous: The Teen Years. 

 Throughout, the film is highly immersive, especially with its music and lighting, in re-creating what this atmosphere is like. 

They indeed meet young men (Samuel Bottomley and Shaun Thomas) — the third girl prefers their female friend — and eventually, complications ensue, in the form of jealousy, and later thornier questions of consent. 

How to Have Sex could have gone wrong in any number of ways. It could have gone the nihilistic route, or the slut-slaming one, or something resembling an after-school special. But the film manages to land on a tone that’s just right. 

How to Have Sex lands in some theaters on Friday and more next week. Mubi is listed as a distributor, so I imagine it will stream there eventually. 

This weekend’s other Molly-directed movie about teen girls trying to have sex is Fitting In, which debuted at South by Southwest last spring under the title Bloody Hell (I can’t decide which of the two titles I like more). 

Fitting In

If you really, really liked the gynecologist joke at the end of Barbie, here comes another movie that combines Barbie references with gynecological detail. Also like Barbie? There’s a big speech at the end that’s way better than America Ferrera’s.

Fitting In, another poignant coming-of-age film with a very different vibe from the other one this week, stars Maddie Ziegler as Lindy, a 16-year-old who discovers that she essentially does not have a functional vagina or reproductive system. This explains her lack of periods up until that point but throws a big wrench into plans to lose her virginity to her boyfriend Adam (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, from the great TV series Reservation Dogs.) 

The condition is formally called  MRKH syndrome, from which McGlynn, the writer/director, also suffers. And this is certainly an experience that lends itself to subtle nuances, such as missing out on such female bonding rituals as being able to complain about her period or borrow a tampon.

Other things, though, are played for comedy, such as the notion that birth control is “a gateway drug to Big Pharma,” and the best use of Peaches’ song “Fuck the Pain Away” since that one Letterkenny episode. There’s also a fight over a lane at the high school track that seems like a homage to the Mary Decker/Zola Budd incident. 

Ziegler, the lead actress, is Sia’s longtime “mini-me” who also starred in one of the worst movies of the millennium, Music. But she’s much better here, successfully holding the screen and conveying the emotional stakes of the story. 

 It can’t be overstated enough how this is the type of story that Hollywood never, ever touched until relatively recently, seemingly with the belief that it would disgust male moviegoers and that marketing such stories to female ones wouldn’t be worth it. Last summer’s Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God It’s Me Margaret made a teenage girl getting her first period as the climax of an eloquent emotional arc. But let’s not forget- that beloved book took 50 years to make it to the screen. 

Fitting In comes out in theaters on Friday.