Pleasure (2021)

Pleasure is special because it refuses to sensationalize its subject or look away; it watches ambition up close, with the clear-eyed intensity of a coming-of-age story set in a world most movies either glamorize or reduce to cautionary headlines. Ninja Thyberg directs with an unflinching, almost documentary immediacy, and Sofia Kappel’s performance is so raw and controlled you can feel every calculation, every compromise, every flicker of doubt behind the confidence she projects. The vibe is gripping, provocative, and deeply uncomfortable in the way honest work often is—less about titillation than about power, consent, and the price of chasing a brand-new identity. It’s absolutely not for everyone given the extreme explicit content, but if you can handle that, you’ll find a fearless drama that stays with you because it treats its characters like human beings, not talking points.

Pleasure is clearly trying to be an unglamorous, inside-the-machine look at how ambition, branding, and power dynamics collide in the porn industry, and it doesn’t flinch from showing the costs. The problem is that the central character can feel emotionally distant and underwritten, so the film’s most intense moments sometimes land more as endurance tests than as insight, and you may wish it dug deeper into the people behind the scenes instead of circling the same point. It’s also extremely explicit and frequently brutal in its depiction of sex and coercion, so if you’re not prepared for graphic, prolonged material (including a harrowing staged assault scene), this will feel punishing rather than illuminating. If you can handle the content, the performances and the occasional glimpses of on-set consent culture give it some value—but it’s not a nuanced character drama so much as a stark, abrasive cautionary portrait.