Vague Visages’ Doin’ It review contains minor spoilers. Sara Zandieh’s 2024 movie (released theatrically in 2025) features Lilly Singh, Sonia Dhillon-Tully and Sabrina Jalees. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Sex comedies about the loss of virginity almost always center on teenagers. For these type of characters, sex is built up to a mythical status, framed as a transformative act that ushers one into adulthood and unlocks the mysteries of a secret world of unmitigated pleasure. There’s typically an immense pressure to complete this rite of passage before college. Doin’ It, directed by Sara Zandieh, has an evocative title, but the twist is that the film is not about a teenager’s first time at all; instead, it follows a 30-year-old virgin who ironically ends up teaching a sex education class. Representations of adult virgins are rare, and Doin’ It handles the subject with juvenile humor.

Doin’ It opens with one of its many hit-or-miss gags. Zandieh, along with co-writers Neel Patel and Lilly Singh, take bold swings at sexual humor; however, the execution frequently flounders. The 15-year-old Maya (Celine Joseph) is about to perform in a talent show — not the traditional Indian dance that honors her heritage or the kind her conservative mother (Sonia Dhillon Tully as Veena) and nani (Usha Uppal) would approve of, but rather a provocative American hip-hop routine. Before Maya goes on stage, she and a male friend play “I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours,” and the boy’s excitement over seeing her naked breasts goes all over her face — just in time for the stage curtain to open and reveal the scene to the entire auditorium. Instead of chalking the incident up to teenage experimentation, Maya’s mother whisks her away to India, where any and all “dirty thoughts” are met with corporal punishment, such as standing outside in the heat for hours. The message becomes loud and clear for Maya: sex is bad.  

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When Maya returns to America as an adult (now portrayed by the aforementioned Lilly Singh) her best friend Jess (a witty, husky-voiced Sabrina Jalees) learns she’s still a virgin. The female pal then makes it her mission to help the protagonist lose her virginity and experience all the rebellion she missed out on as a teenager. This leads to raunchy sequences where Maya almost hooks up with men who have bizarre kinks, considers dipping her toes into the lady pool and runs into a former classmate with a comically oversized package. Eventually, Singh’s character meets a fellow teacher, Alex (Trevor Salter, who exudes a kind, calm aura), but can’t shake her nani’s judgment from her mind. In a flashback sequence, the grandmother’s icy glare bores straight into the camera as she wags her finger and chastises her granddaughter’s sinful lust. This tiny but mighty scene makes it clear how deep Maya’s guilt runs and how heavily the boundaries of purity culture weigh on her. It shadows every decision she makes, even as an adult.

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Alongside Maya’s quest to lose her virginity, she teaches her teenage students everything she can about sex. While Doin’ It relies on broad humor, it goes too far in these scenes: the protagonist has her class create arts and crafts versions of their genitalia, assigns them to practice “self-love” for homework and even projects a slideshow of various sex positions. In a time when teachers are being required to hang the Ten Commandments in their classrooms, it’s hard to suspend your disbelief and accept that Maya could get away with this — even if it’s all meant for laughs. The only time the protagonist’s boundary-pushing teaching antics are genuinely funny is when she cries to her students about her current love life. 

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As Maya, Singh — a YouTuber and former talk show host — nimbly dances between Doin’ It’s cartoonish comedic beats and heavier emotional moments, which feel more poignant when she directly addresses the audience. The actress makes Maya’s wrestling between her enthusiasm for sex positivity in the classroom and her internalized shame palpable: “I’m confident with everything else, but when it comes to this stuff, it’s like I’m broken,” the protagonist admits. This is more common for women than society realizes.

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Doin’ It’s quirky side characters burst in and out of the narrative like firecrackers, keeping the film constantly buzzing with energy. There’s Sydney Topliffe’s pensive Abbey Ho (who is hesitant about sleeping with her boyfriend), Ashley Singh’s popular fashionista Crystal (who searches for her identity), the pro-abstinence zealot Madison (Jessica Clement) and the dumb but big-hearted jock Kyle (Christian Martyn). There’s also another teacher played by Mary Holland, whose pressed prissiness and overt racism feel like something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Maya’s mother has a sweet arc about enjoying the romance plot in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever (2020-23), yet the woman feels ashamed to start dating, which illustrates how prudish attitudes about sex are generational.

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Doin’ It admirably decenters Maya’s quest to lose her virginity; it’s not something she pursues with desperation, but rather a genuine desire to understand her own body and cultivate a healthy relationship with sex. This is a welcome change from other sex comedies, where losing one’s virginity is just an item on a checklist to be crossed off as quickly as possible, for pure satisfaction and nothing more. Despite its good intentions, Doin’ It doesn’t quite hit the right tone. Its silliness teeters into downright cringiness, like a parent-clueless-about-their-kid-masturbating joke that has been repeated countless times since American Pie (1999). Zandieh, Patel and Singh clearly wanted to push the envelope with their comedy, but the film would have been more impactful if it had been more grounded. Doin’ It is caught in the bind of being too obnoxious for adults and too unrelatable for younger viewers. Any goodwill you might have for the film quickly disappears when you realize that Sex Ed (2014), starring Hayley Joel Osment, handles the virtually identical plot far better. Ultimately, Doin’ It barely earns a passing grade.

Doin’ It released theatrically on September 19, 2025.

Caroline Madden (@crolinss) is the author of Springsteen as Soundtrack. She’s also a film critic who has written for Screen Queens, Reverse Shot, IndieWire and more. Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Video Librarian. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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