Berlinale 2026 Review: Porn and Gen Z Intimacy Clashes in Sweet Coming-of-Age TRULY NAKED

Muriel d’Ansembourg’s feature debut Truly Naked opens with an unconventional premise. A pornographic scene unfolds in a chamber-like setting, filmed by a teenage boy who is not only operating the camera but also partially directing the performers. When the shoot ends, a conversation between the teenage DoP Alec (Caolán O’Gorman), the middle-aged performer Dylan (Andrew Howard), and his co-star Lizzie (Alessa Savage) reveals that Alec is in fact Dylan’s son. Lizzie, meanwhile, has long been part of the family’s small-scale adult content operation.

Dylan, a widower and single parent, has spent years working in pornography, long enough for his adolescent son to become involved in the production process. Alec not only operates the camera and edits his father’s videos but increasingly contributes ideas for new material. Truly Naked does not follow the usual coming-of-age trajectory, although d’Ansembourg incorporates certain melodramatic elements within its boy-meets-girl formula.

The director’s short films, including Play, Sharp Edges, and the BAFTA-nominated Good Night, reveal a recurring interest in characters navigating transitional emotional states, often adolescents encountering unfamiliar experiences. Her settings tend to be ordinary or socially constrained, yet within them she isolates situations in which intimacy appears fragile or misdirected. Her recent short Fuck-A-Fan approached sexuality from a similar perspective exposing the illusion of porn industry. Truly Naked expands on that earlier work, which also featured Alessa Savage.

Alec is a quiet and observant teenager raised within the routines of his father’s small pornography business. After relocating with Dylan from London to a provincial seaside town, he finds himself an awkward and introverted presence at school, albeit with an unusual after-school occupation. When assigned a project on porn addiction, Alec is paired with Nina (Safiya Benaddi), a sharp-tongued, goth-styled feminist whose outlook sharply contrasts with his own.

Following the unexpected opening, the film moves into more recognizable territory as Alec and Nina’s relationship develops. Yet the dynamic functions less as a conventional romantic arc than as a confrontation between two perspectives. Alec’s understanding of sexuality has been shaped by the technical routines of porn production, including camera placement, performance cues, and lighting arrangements. Nina, who criticizes the objectification of women and the misogyny embedded in mainstream pornography, approaches the subject from a fundamentally different position.

Rather than resolving their differences through simple romantic reconciliation, their relationship unfolds as a process of gradual education. Alec begins to recognize the distance between performed representation and real intimacy, while Nina develops a more nuanced understanding of performers such as Lizzie, who articulates her own sense of agency within the industry.

At the same time, the story runs a parallel father-son strand. For much of the film, Alec treats his father’s profession as normal. Dylan, however, faces increasing pressure as the economics of online pornography shift. With free material widely available and viewership declining, his small operation struggles to remain profitable. His response is to push toward more extreme content. One shoot involves an attempt at Japanese-inspired kink featuring a live octopus.

By this point Alec is already under Nina’s influence, both intellectually and emotionally, and begins reassessing the environment in which he has grown up. The turning point arrives when Dylan recruits a woman he has just met in a pharmacy for a shoot. The production quickly becomes uncomfortable due to the woman’s inexperience and lack of understanding of what performing in pornography entails, compounded by Dylan’s insistence on more aggressive practices. Alec, increasingly uneasy, begins to distance himself from his father’s work.

Despite relying on certain familiar narrative patterns, Truly Naked approaches its subject with notable earnestness. The film attempts to move beyond the artifice of pornography without resorting to overt moralizing. Much of this balance emerges through the tension between Alec’s pragmatic familiarity with the industry and Nina’s more critical stance toward sexual commodification. D’Ansembourg avoids presenting the debate in stark moral terms, allowing different viewpoints to coexist. Lizzie, for example, describes the sense of empowerment she derives from performing.

Although clearly oriented toward a younger generation raised in the era of widely accessible online pornography, the film does not shy away from explicit imagery. This choice lends the depiction a degree of realism and avoids the contradiction of addressing a topic that its intended audience is already familiar with in more extreme forms online. At the same time, the film consistently frames these scenes through a distinctly female perspective. Despite the male protagonist, the dominant gaze remains female, shaping how the sexual material is presented.

Ultimately, Truly Naked addresses pornography less as a subject in itself than as a lens through which to examine generational attitudes toward masculinity, intimacy, and representation. Made by a predominantly female creative team across writing, directing, cinematography, and editing, the film situates its coming-of-age story within the broader cultural conversation surrounding sexuality in the digital era. Unlike Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, an unflinching portrait of the porn industry, d’Ansembourg’s film operates on a smaller and more intimate scale, using the setting of porn production primarily as a background for exploring shifting ideas of relationships, intimacy and generational masculinity. D’Ansembourg’s feature debut is a sweet counter-offense to the incel culture and misogyny spun from porn exploitation.