The most revealing thing Adam Samuels does is rescue a woman from another man. He recognizes the threat immediately, knows how to make himself safe, says the right things, and gives her the reassuring experience of being approached by somebody who appears to understand the rules. By morning, after they have slept together, his interest has vanished. The danger was real. Adam’s decency is real too, at least in the limited sense that he knows how decency is supposed to look. Jonathan Schey’s Everybody Wants To Fck Me* is sharpest when it studies the murky territory between those two facts.
Taron Egerton plays Adam as a man who has turned enlightened masculinity into camouflage. His apartment advertises Cléo from 5 to 7. He carries a MUBI tote bag, reads books by women, talks about the Before films, and names his dog after Alana Haim. He works at an almost entirely female art gallery and supports a colleague’s professional ambitions with the fluency of somebody who knows exactly which signals will register as safe. The film does not initially photograph or stage these details as sinister clues. They are simply part of Adam’s environment, which is precisely why they work. Nothing announces the villain because Adam does not think there is one.
Egerton understands that self-deception better than the script sometimes does. His Adam is funny because he rarely appears to be performing for himself. When he explains that he is in a “bojangled headspace” after losing interest in a woman he was recently sleeping with, the language is ridiculous, yet Egerton plays the excuse with enough sincerity to reveal the deeper problem. Adam has developed such elegant language for selfishness that selfishness now feels like emotional intelligence. His best friend Emma, played with easy irritation by Charly Clive, calls the behavior romantic terrorism. Adam receives this as criticism of his technique rather than his character.
That distinction gives the opening stretch its moral precision. Schey is less interested in exposing a secret misogynist than in showing how easily predatory patterns can hide inside progressive manners. Adam is surrounded by women who like him, trust him, work with him, and occasionally enable him. He can point to all of this as evidence in his own defense. His behavior leaves emotional wreckage behind, yet there is no dramatic lighting cue waiting to tell him when he has crossed a line.
Then Sofia arrives, and Jessica Henwick immediately changes the balance because Sofia recognizes Adam’s script before he can finish performing it. She mocks his dating profile and notices the neglected matches accumulating on his phone. Their exchange at the theater bar has the pleasure of watching somebody step around traps that usually work. She still takes him home, where a strange encounter leaves him unconscious. He wakes with Sofia gone, an irritation on his body, and a new problem: women have begun reacting to him with an intensity that quickly escapes the category of attraction.
Schey’s smartest decision is to let the first stages look almost flattering. Colleagues laugh harder at Adam’s jokes. Attention comes easily. The revolving door of his sex life spins faster. The change initially looks like confirmation of everything Adam already believes about himself.
Then public space turns hostile: an older woman targets him on the Tube, a colleague corners him in an office bathroom, and women pursue him with an aggression he cannot negotiate through charm. Even his dog begins behaving differently around him. The spatial progression is important. Adam once moved through London with confidence because he understood the social codes around him. The film strips that confidence away by making ordinary spaces unreliable. A train carriage, workplace bathroom, bar, or street can become threatening as soon as attention becomes entitlement.
Here the thriller conceit briefly achieves something the satire alone could not. Adam experiences sexual attention as a question of safety. Desire changes meaning once refusal stops mattering.
The trouble is that Schey keeps escalating the situation after the idea has already become clear. Horror requires pressure, but pressure without development eventually becomes repetition. New pursuers appear, the behavior grows increasingly feral, and the film begins searching for bigger shocks while Adam remains curiously static inside them.
That weakness extends to the women around him. Emma understands Adam better than anyone, yet their friendship rarely develops into a serious confrontation with what he has done. Sofia begins as the only person capable of puncturing his performance cleanly, then becomes tangled inside the machinery of the plot. Women who initially expose Adam’s habits gradually become bodies through which the premise operates. The irony is uncomfortable. A film criticizing a man for treating women as interchangeable functions starts doing something adjacent once its thriller mechanism takes control.
Schey appears aware that escalation alone cannot carry the final stretch, so explanations begin accumulating. Satyr mythology enters the picture. Biological and technological possibilities appear. Drugs, insects, and the mechanics behind Adam’s condition begin demanding attention. None of these ideas is unusable by itself. Together, they pull the film toward a question it was never especially good at answering: how did this happen? The better question has been sitting in plain sight: what does it do to him?
Egerton keeps that question alive longer than the screenplay does. His comic timing gives weak beats some elasticity, and his growing panic never erases the charm that made Adam dangerous in the first place. That matters. A simpler performance would split the character into before and after, smug seducer followed by frightened victim. Egerton lets both versions coexist. Even when Adam is terrified, traces of the man who once enjoyed controlling every encounter remain visible.
Schey’s handling of tone is less assured. The Tube and office-bathroom encounters gain tension from familiar spaces becoming unsafe, while other horror passages rely far more heavily on pursuit and shock. The city is capable of looking alive and socially specific, especially around the gallery, theater, cafés, and transport system. When the film leans hardest into threat, that sense of place sometimes gives way to functional escalation. The danger grows louder without becoming stranger.
That leaves Everybody Wants To Fck Me* caught inside the same contradiction as Adam. Both possess an impressive vocabulary for presenting themselves as thoughtful. Adam has cinema references, feminist language, and perfect manners. The film has gender satire, social horror, Greek mythology, biotech complications, and a self-aware final joke. The early scenes make those ingredients feel diagnostic. Later, some begin to resemble accessories.
There is still something nasty and perceptive in the idea that witnesses can separate flirtation from menace, or that the performance of goodness can become another instrument of control. Schey sees that clearly. Egerton sees it even more clearly.
The film keeps looking for increasingly elaborate ways to explain Adam’s curse when the most disturbing explanation was already walking around London carrying a MUBI bag.
Everybody Wants to F*ck Me had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2026, ahead of a wider theatrical release. The dark comedy thriller follows a performative art gallery employee who wakes up to find every woman around him uncontrollably obsessed with him after a fateful bar encounter.
Where to Watch (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Everybody Wants to F*ck Me
Distributor: StudioCanal
Release date: September 11, 2026 (Toronto International Film Festival)
Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes
Director: Jonathan Schey
Writers: Jonathan Schey
Producers and Executive Producers: Cecilia Frugiuele, Olivier Kaempfer, Tom Ackerley, Douglas Cox, Yemi Adegbulu
Cast: Taron Egerton, Jessica Henwick, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Charly Clive, Herbert Nordrum, Sophie Simnett, Nadia Parkes, Antonia Clarke
Editors: Joe Randall-Cutler
The Review
Everybody Wants to F*ck Me
Everybody Wants To Fck Me* finds its sharpest material in Adam’s ability to disguise selfishness as sensitivity, then turns that social camouflage against him with a smart reversal of sexual threat. Taron Egerton keeps the character funny, unpleasant, and recognizably human even as the screenplay loses its nerve. Schey’s escalating horror supplies memorable discomfort, but mythology, science, and explanation gradually crowd out the moral question that made the premise worth pursuing. The film understands Adam far better before it starts explaining his curse.
PROS
- Taron Egerton’s layered comic performance
- Sharp opening satire of performative masculinity
- Effective reversal of sexual threat
- Strong use of familiar spaces becoming unsafe
CONS
- Escalation outpaces character development
- Supporting women become increasingly functional
- Overcomplicated mythology and explanation
- Horror loses some of the opening’s precision
