Reception
According to the marketing body for UK commercial television, Consent was watched by approximately 316,000 viewers at the time of broadcast, which combined with 83,000 VOSDAL viewers and 165,000 saving it for later made it the 34th most-watched Channel Four program of the week with 8.4% of their national audience.
Consent has been described by Anita Singh in The Telegraph as "required viewing" for UK schools, particularly teenagers, and in style and construction has been compared with John Hughes 1980 Brat Pack film, Pretty in Pink. Writing in Stylist magazine, Kayleigh Dray favourably compared the film's portrayal of its themes to such recent documentary pieces as Zara McDermott's 2021 Uncovering Rape Culture, which saw McDermott draw on her own experience of almost being raped. In The Guardian, Barbara Ellen drew connections with the broader Metoo movement and how it intersects with the ethics of consent and peer-pressure. The choice of casting the Archie character as the main protagonist was praised by Sophie McBain in the New Statesman, who suggested that had, for example, the film focussed on Raffy, it would have been far less powerful viewing.
The acting out of their WhatsApp messages by the characters was criticised by Singh, which she suggested was "stagey" and detracted from the film's authenticity, as also, she felt the use of actors older than those they were portraying. The online legal journal Lexology also criticised the film as while holding lofty ambitions to play a role in the fight against tox masculinity, it eventually realised itself as a lost opportunity. Matthew Hardcastle of law firm Kingsley Napley argues that, notwithstanding that the narrative was already flawed by its relatively short length, numerous legal matters were either misunderstood—that, for example, Natalie's accusations would only be taken seriously with backing evidence-omitted entirely, such as the fact that school-led investigations would usually be multi-agency led, or downplayed (for example, the role of social media was covered from the boys' perspective but would also have provided a forum for a backlash. Finally, Hardcastle argues, while we see Natalie make her report to the police, we then do not see the consequences on the numerous lives this would have gave impacted: "Perhaps the single biggest difference between Consent and real-life was the portrayal of certainty in circumstances where there often is none".
Soma Sara, who founded the anti-rape website, Everyone's Invited, welcomed the film's release, stating in Glamour magazine that she saw it as restarting an urgent discussion in UK schools. The film was described by Morgan Cormack in The Radio Times as "one of the most important watches" of the year, based mainly on its approach to themes such as porn culture, sexual harassment and misogyny, but also on how it suggested the inability or unwillingness of staff to recognise the extent of the issue. Ellen E. Jones, writing in The Guardian considered that, in Consent, "there is a lot that is timely about ... [it] and a lot that is horribly timeless". She also notes issues of race highlighted when, for example, Raffy—"his hair an apt shade of Slytherin blonde"—refers to the black, working-class Natalie as "trying to get Markled". She compared the film, in some of its issues, as akin to The Inbetweeners, but with a tragic aggressive rather than humorous, premise. A similar comparison was made by McBain, who—describing Raffy as "cartoonishly awful"—compares him to The Inbetweeners' Jay Cartwright, had the latter "been born into the Andrew Tate generation". Jones highlights Victor's careful portrayal, almost simultaneously, as both "a confused, fearful child and a dangerously self-pitying man". Jones argues that, while the film appears to end on a positive note—with Natalie having both the courage and the evidence to report her rape:
Anyone who saw Lucy Kirkwood's astounding Maryland ... or Unbelievable, or who has followed, with horror, the trial of yet another Met police officer charged with rape, will not be so comforted.
