Movies such as “Boogie Nights” have attempted to depict the porn industry in a feature film, but no film has ever shown just how raw, shocking and disturbing porn can be quite like Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure.” The movie is based on Thyberg’s 2013 short film about a young woman from Sweden who moves to Los Angeles and tries to become a porn star. “Pleasure” originally premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, but it’s finally coming to theaters this year courtesy of Neon.
Sofia Kappel stars in the leading role of Linnéa, who works as a porn star under the stage name “Bella Cherry.” Many of the actors in “Pleasure” come from the real porn industry, and Thyberg has said she researched the film by immersing herself in the porn scene. According to the director, most of the shocking incidents viewers see in the movie are based on things she witnessed. Thyberg was recently nominated for best director at the Independent Spirit Awards.
Neon’s official synopsis for “Pleasure” reads: “Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature film ‘Pleasure’ is a journey into the Los Angeles porn industry through the lens of newcomer Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel). Strong, self-confident and determined, Bella embarks on a mission to become the best at any cost.”
In his review out of Sundance, Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that “Pleasure” takes “a stark, disturbingly authentic plunge into what the porn world has become…’Pleasure’ has the clinical look and feel of a documentary pegged to the frame of a fictionalized story. It’s a coldly artful and explicit piece of anthropological voyeurism, and its subject is what pornography has become — what it is, what it’s selling, why the people who perform in it are drawn to it, what it does for them, what it does to them and what it’s doing to all of us.”
Neon is set to open “Pleasure” in theaters on May 13. Watch the official trailer for the porn drama in the video below.
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