It’s been just over a decade since director Sean Garrity teamed up with actors Jonas Chernick and Emily Hampshire to produce the 2012 sex-comedy An Awkward Sexual Adventure, where Chernick portrayed a jilted office drone who looks to spice up his love-making game with the help of an exotic dancer played by Hampshire. All three are now a little older, but not too mature to dive into the same subject pool for that film’s spiritual successor, The End of Sex.
This time, Chernick (also pulling double-duty as screenwriter) and Hampshire are happily married couple Josh and Emma, who after packing their two young daughters off to “winter camp” (likely to account for the production’s winter shooting schedule) find themselves in an unexpected rut. While super parents and the best of companions, the two quickly realise that they seem to have lost much of their sexual chemistry since their last child was conceived.
Eager…no, desperate to shake things up in the bedroom, the couple turn to every modern solution in sight, from a threesome with their bi-curious friend Wendy (Melanie Scrofano) to a night in a grungy-yet-upscale sex club (with some fun cameos) to some Ecstasy pills secured from Josh’s fun-loving coworker Kelly (Lily Gao). But this wouldn’t be a fulfilling story if life were that simple and this couple will have to navigate more than just sexual frustration before blue balls and dry vag come between them for good.
It’s actually quite a breath of fresh air to come across a slickly-produced crowd-pleasing (albeit an R-rated crowd) comedy from a Canadian film industry that often seems hell-bent on depressing whatever meagre paying audience they can reach (Last year’s VIFF was a particular downer).
Chernick and Hampshire shine here as a winning screen duo, with the former’s nebbish geekiness perfectly complementing the latter’s arrested awkwardness. The script moves efficiently with exploring the couple’s sexual misadventures, but also devoting appropriate time to more grounded marital frustrations which manifest both in and outside the relationship. The film occasionally struggles with maintaining verisimilitude at times, but the heightened comic nature on display allows most of this to be easily forgiven.
Director Garrity and Writer Chernick make a great team here, having crafted a hilariously earnest comedy about how the march of time and circumstance wreaks havoc on our base needs. The End of Sex shows that approaching middle age need not in fact be the end, but may just be an awkward adventure, much like this film’s aforementioned predecessor.
8/10
The End of Sex releases in Canadian theatres on Friday, April 28