Taron Egerton plays a man who believes he has figured out how to be the perfect modern “nice guy” in Everybody Wants to F–k Me, Jonathan Schey’s feature directorial debut at TIFF 2026.
But Adam’s carefully constructed image begins to collapse after a strange encounter turns his dating life into something much darker.
The film uses that premise to take aim at performative masculinity, dating culture and men who define themselves by everything they believe they are not. TheWrap’s review argues that its ideas are often sharper than its overall execution.
At a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Film | Everybody Wants to F–k Me |
| Star | Taron Egerton |
| Director | Jonathan Schey |
| Festival | TIFF 2026 |
| Setting | London dating scene |
| Egerton’s character | Adam |
| Key co-stars | Jessica Henwick, Charly Clive, Mia McKenna-Bruce |
| Editor | Joe Randall-Cutler |
| Composer | Anna Meredith |
| Type | Comedy/thriller with dating and social satire |
Taron Egerton Plays a Man Who Thinks He Is Different
Adam has built his identity around being unlike the men he considers toxic.
He reads the “right” books, including Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl. He attends an all-women yoga class and deliberately avoids staring at other participants.
He also believes listening is more important than talking and uses cultural markers, including a MUBI tote bag, to reinforce his image as a thoughtful, sophisticated cinephile.
But the film quickly challenges that self-image.
An early encounter with a woman exposes a less flattering side of Adam. After they have sex, he pulls away when she suggests a more meaningful relationship.
The point is not that Adam behaves like an obvious misogynist. It is that his polished version of masculinity can hide many of the same selfish impulses.
Egerton keeps that vanity visible instead of turning Adam into a straightforward victim. That gives the performance more complexity than the character initially appears to have.
Jessica Henwick’s Sofia Changes Everything
Adam meets Sofia, played by Jessica Henwick, at a bar.
She quickly sees through his carefully performed personality and challenges his distinction between “nice guys” and the men he considers bad.
Adam follows her home expecting the evening to end in sex.
Instead, the situation takes an unexpected turn. He is given a substance he does not recognize and becomes involved in a humiliating sexual game that pushes the movie from romantic comedy territory into something much more unsettling.
The sudden tonal shift is one of the film’s more effective moves.
Schey and editor Joe Randall-Cutler use the change to make the encounter feel increasingly sinister rather than simply provocative.
Then Adam Becomes the Object of Desire
After the encounter, Adam starts noticing something strange.
Women stare at him for unusually long periods. They laugh too enthusiastically at his jokes and appear increasingly interested in his body.
What initially seems flattering becomes frightening.
Adam begins attracting women almost everywhere he goes, turning him into a kind of unwilling magnet for attention.
The film uses this reversal to put its central character inside the experience he has previously viewed from the other side.
The Oedipus Rex Reference Matters
One of the film’s early scenes has Adam and his friend Emma, played by Charly Clive, attending a performance of Oedipus Rex.
The reference is not simply decorative.
The film later uses the themes surrounding the classical tragedy in deliberately uncomfortable ways, reinforcing its interest in desire, power and distorted relationships.
Clive is also among the performances that help keep the film engaging even when its story starts moving in too many directions.
The Movie Keeps Changing Shape
This is where the biggest criticism of Everybody Wants to F–k Me emerges.
The film appears to contain several different movies at once.
It begins as a satire of modern masculinity and dating culture, shifts into a romantic encounter, moves toward sexual humiliation and then develops into something closer to a disturbing fantasy.
The individual ideas can be provocative, but the transitions eventually make the story feel scattered.
TheWrap describes the film as a collection of competing ideas rather than one argument that develops cleanly from beginning to end.
Strong Performances Cannot Fix the Message
Egerton is the film’s central strength, while Henwick and Clive also make strong impressions.
The problem is that the screenplay does not always give those performances enough to build toward.
Several plot threads appear promising before the movie moves on to something else. The result is a film that raises questions about toxic masculinity and disguised selfishness without developing a convincing alternative.
It knows what it wants to criticize, but its argument becomes increasingly difficult to follow.
Anna Meredith’s Score Adds Another Layer
The music is one of the film’s more distinctive elements.
Composer Anna Meredith uses an operatic score filled with unusual vocal textures, chants and yodel-like sounds.
The effect works almost like a chorus surrounding Adam, particularly as the film shifts between different tones.
The score often signals that another change in the story is coming.
The Film Also Takes Aim at “Enlightened” Culture
Adam’s MUBI tote bag is more than a character detail.
Schey uses recognizable cultural brands and signals of sophistication to examine the way certain people construct an identity around being progressive, knowledgeable or emotionally aware.
Adam knows the language.
The problem is whether his behavior actually matches it.
That gap between self-image and reality is one of the film’s clearest targets.
When Desire Turns Violent
The movie becomes especially complicated when the women’s attraction to Adam starts becoming violent.
Instead of simply reversing the usual dating dynamic, the film connects their behavior to Adam’s own distorted view of people.
They begin to look less like individuals and more like bodies driven by appetite.
That creates an uncomfortable contradiction: a film criticizing the reduction of people to sexual objects also uses that idea as one of its main sources of suspense and shock.
Is ‘Everybody Wants to F–k Me’ a Good Movie?
The answer depends largely on how much weight is placed on the film’s ideas versus its structure.
There is plenty here to provoke a reaction.
Egerton gives Adam an unusually layered performance, Henwick brings energy to Sofia, and the movie is willing to take its premise into uncomfortable territory.
But the story repeatedly changes direction before fully exploring its own ideas.
The result is an ambitious TIFF debut that has interesting things to say about modern dating and performative masculinity, but does not always know how to say them with the same confidence.
The Verdict
Everybody Wants to F–k Me works best when it puts Adam’s carefully maintained identity under pressure.
Its central joke is also its central problem: the man who believes he has escaped the worst habits of modern masculinity discovers that changing the appearance of those habits is not necessarily the same as changing them.
Taron Egerton makes that contradiction worth watching.
The film itself, however, struggles to turn its provocative premise into a fully coherent story.
