Everybody Wants to F*ck Me: Movie Review

Jonathan Schey’s Everybody Wants to F*ck Me starts as a comedy about modern dating and becomes something with teeth. Taron Egerton has never been better.

Adam (Taron Egerton, of Carry-On) works at an art gallery and has built an entire personality out of seeming decent. He reads the correct authors. He does yoga. He deflects with self-deprecation, which passes for humility right up until you notice it is a tactic. Women get one night and a rehearsed speech about why he is not ready for more. Then he meets Sofia (Jessica Henwick, of Glass Onion), a Classics student who clocks the routine on sight, and the movie stops being a comedy about dating. Saying more would wreck it. I will only note that when a film is described as being about the perils of modern romance, peril can be the load-bearing word.

Casting Egerton is both the joke and the point. He has spent a career refusing to coast on the face, playing Elton John, a Kingsman recruit, a con man doing federal time in Black Bird, and here, a man whose entire operating system is being wanted. The film pokes fun at his status as an object of international affection, then leans into it hard enough to make you shift in your seat. Henwick matches him each step of the way. Schey has populated the supporting roster with star players, with Mia McKenna-Bruce, Charly Clive, Herbert Nordrum and Antonia Clarke all locked onto the same unpredictable frequency. So is the dog playing Egerton’s cute canine, who Schey confirmed after the premiere is a certified diva that had trouble staying still.

Schey writes dialogue that sounds like people talking to one another. Nothing is cutely coded or straining to be quotable, and it stays modern and direct without vanishing into vibes. He also has a real gift for misdirection, setting an expectation with enough confidence that you follow it off a cliff without complaint. Kate Reid’s breezy cinematography captures London’s good side and not just the usual shots of Big Ben and Tower Bridge; editor Joe Randall-Cutler ensures the audience doesn’t get ahead of the narrative, and Francesca Massariol gives the production a sleek look that tells us it’s today without having to label it. The whole filmmaking team holds the surface steady while the register underneath keeps sliding. That is much harder to pull off than it looks, and it’s why the often-devious turns land.

In Toronto, a tone conversation is already forming around this one, and I must try to squash it. It is a black comedy. The whiplash is the point. Complaining that a film about a man performing goodness won’t hold a steady register misses what it is built to do. My actual reservation is smaller and more specific. Schey never quite builds the case against Adam. He is a try-hard with a bad script for letting women down easy, but we never see him be cruel, throw his weight around, or take genuine pleasure in the damage. Maybe that is deliberate, since an outright monster would have flattened what follows into a simple lesson.

Still, I wanted more reason to want what Adam gets. What the film does have is a real question about the energy men put out, about how much of what reads as toxic is posturing and how much is just a person, and it goes further with that than most films built on the same idea. It is also, to be unambiguous, a blast. I laughed. I winced. I sat forward. Schey’s debut announces a filmmaker who can write, who can hold a cast on one wavelength, and who is not remotely afraid of his audience. Bring a friend. Just don’t say the title out loud on the way in.

Everybody Wants to F*ck Me had its World Premiere at TIFF on September 11, 2026.