The film stars Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake and Enva Lewis as three sixteen-year-old best friends who encounter new friendships, sexual pressures and self-discovery during a holiday.

[7] Sixteen-year-old best friends Tara, Em, and Skye head to the party resort of Malia on the Greek island of Crete for a rites-of-passage holiday.

Tara grows closer to Badger, but is disheartened when she witnesses him volunteer to go onstage at an outdoor club to have multiple strangers perform sex acts on him as part of a game, and she leaves.

In the morning, the final day of the trip, Tara attempts to sleep in, but Paddy enters the room and makes romantic overtures, which Badger witnesses and is heartbroken by.

Mia McKenna-Bruce, Lara Peake, Shaun Thomas, Samuel Bottomley, Enva Lewis and Laura Ambler joined the cast of the film, with Molly Manning Walker directing from a screenplay she wrote, and shooting in Greece in October 2022, according to Deadline Hollywood,[8] while according to The Guardian, the film was shot on location in Malia, Crete, over two months from September 2021.

The website's consensus reads: "A powerful debut for Molly Manning Walker, How to Have Sex authentically captures female adolescence and friendship with sobering effervescence.

"[14] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 79 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[16][17][18][19] The Observer's Wendy Ide wrote, "Walker's handling of the film's tonal range is remarkably assured: the picture is skittish, spirited and very funny, and at the same time troubling and bruisingly sad.

"[20] Guy Lodge of Variety described McKenna-Bruce's performance as "star-making", adding the film "lays out the minefield of sexual education and consent for a post-#MeToo generation, with a precision to its ambiguities that will draw gasps from its characters' contemporaries and elders alike".