TIFF 2026: ‘Everybody Wants To F*ck Me’ Stars A Game Taron Egerton Who Still Isn’t Enough To Carry The Uneven Film

There’s a moment in Jonathan Schey’s Everybody Wants to F*ck Me where two things seem true. First, the film expertly wields star Taron Egerton’s contrasting personas of playful bashfulness and wicked mischief into something hardened and interesting. The second is that this is going to be a madcap blast that plays and, ideally, upends tropes. Only one remains true throughout, and Egerton’s committed, shameless performance isn’t enough to keep away the stench of nice-guy-isms where, somehow, women are responsible for the monsters they create.

Egerton stars as Adam, a 30-something player who has perfected the “soft boi” persona. He carries around a MUBI tote and has an Agnès Varda, Cleo from 5-7 poster on his bedroom wall. He works at a woman-run art gallery made up of only other women. His personal library consists of novels like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, hands always gripping a story about messy women on the verge of self-discovery. His dog is named after a Haim sister. Yes, the most noteworthy one. He intervenes at bars to play the hero, weaponizing his shining knighthood with the same target in mind – to get these women into bed with him.

He’s put together such a well-chosen persona that it only makes sense he works with gallery curators. He was made for this job. And the final product he’s curated is himself, a walking beacon that shouts at women (but not actually, because he would never) that he’s approachable. He’s better and, crucially, safe. And Egerton does phenomenal work in making us believe why women would trust him, never overplaying either the nice guy card or the weasel. It’s a phenomenal balancing act and, in the first act of the film, promises a wild, daring ride worth his prickly exterior.

Taron Egerton is phenomenal but the film overplays its hand quick.

But, once that honeymoon period ends, we realize we too have been duped. Or, at the very least, led to believe this is a film that it isn’t. Maybe even isn’t the film the director thinks it is because it certainly seems like he believes his debut is progressive. It doesn’t help that the conceit reveals its hand far too early.

Adam pursues women until one of his potential conquests, catching on to his deal, challenges him, calling out how men don’t actually like women, and subsequently lures him home. After waking up with no memory of what happened the night before, discovers that he no longer just knows how to manipulate women’s expectations for sex—he’s being lusted for now with shocking, feral, vigor.

Better, tighter writing would’ve made Everybody Wants to F*ck Me a worthwhile, progressive film that flips the script on the “nice guy,” taking a scalpel to the real horrors of modern dating: men whose dating profile act has their dog in it. Or an ironic vegetable placement while wearing a Greta Gerwig shirt. That’s what it feels like the film is going to be at first, but it rushes through the setup so quickly and, subsequently, loses whatever initial spark made it interesting.

Instead, the longer I sit with the direction the film takes, namely the ending, the more repugnant I find it, and it’s hard to determine whether or not that was the intent of the director. For the most part, it could have been improved if the director had taken more time with the setup. We needed more than just a single anonymous hookup before Adam faces the crux of the film’s conflict. And we definitely needed more of Jessica Henwick’s Sofia. 

Despite the setup as a progressive callout on modern dating horrors, Everybody Wants to F*ck Me takes a bizarre turn.

Everybody Wants to F*ck Me has a few genuinely shocking moments, teed up and ones that arrive out of the blue. The conflict builds real tension as Adam becomes more isolated by his increasingly bizarre circumstances. And the film embraces its squirm-inducing body horror elements. 

The film even tries to humanize him through his friendship with Emma (Charly Clive) and his cherished dog, more drawn to compliment Egerton’s likability when the actor seems all too willing to lean into the scamp. And it’s here where the film goes from intriguing and messy to simply messy.

All films are about something, but not all need to have a core message. Everybody Wants to F*ck Me posits itself as a message movie. But the intent is so muddied by the end it’s hard to tell what the destination was, or if there was ever a clear path at all.

It’s one of those films worth further probing come release, because saying too much now would spoil it. But what begins as a film about a man’s comeuppance turns into one where the wink seems to be delivered by said man instead of directed to. The queasy semantics of the film can’t help but summon up a portrait of a filmmaker who gets the wires crossed on who is the “bad” guy in the film, rather than embracing a much more interesting thread where there can be more than one victim in a film about the horrors of modern dating.

While Taron Egerton is highly entertaining throughout, the film loses itself as it stumbles to the messy finish.

Somehow, Egerton remains watchable throughout, all but carrying the film when things grow increasingly dire. It makes sense that he’d want to pick a role like this, one that lets him file away some of the holdover action-star veneer while also highlighting his strength in comedy. But he deserves a film that matches his gusto and understanding of the role without having to be the sole draw.

Everybody Wants to F*ck Me loses the point early in the second act and struggles to recover, forgoing more interesting ideas for a spat-out ending that feels unearned and meanspirited. The truth of the film comes through in the title and the many inflections and uses of the word that will, surely, be a headache for promotions. Do people want to ‘f*ck’ him, or is he well and truly ‘f*cked’?

Everybody Wants to F*ck Me premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.