Pleasure Review: Intimate & Sometimes Grizzly Vision Of Life In Adult Film

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Boogie Nights is the porn industry film gold standard, but it lives in a world the audience knows, with rules only Paul Thomas Anderson understands. Don Jon looks at what internet porn does to men of a certain age. However, Pleasure is about what a young woman goes through in her career as a porn actress. Writer-director Ninja Thyberg, in her feature film debut, has crafted an entirely feminine portrait that puts lead Sofia Kappel, an adult film star in real life, in a position to thrive. Every performance feels true to life and in some cases, adult film stars are playing alternate versions of themselves. For better or worse, the most successful aspect of Pleasure is it has perhaps the scariest scene of 2022 so far. Thyberg’s vision is raw but never over the top and, as a result, Pleasure delivers a focused look at an industry viewers rarely see rooted in such realism.

When Bella Cherry (Kappel) moves to Los Angles from Sweden to pursue a career in adult films, she quickly gets in over her head. At her very first shoot, she is warned that other women in the industry are known for taking advantage of new blood like herself. So when Bella moves into a house full of women who do porn, she is standoffish at first. Eventually, she finds a friend in her roommate Joy (Zelda Morrison), and she can see for herself that she was lied to by the men on set. The newly minted friend group begins going to networking events together and Bella slowly becomes a budding star. After getting over her first-time jitters, her second scene is as much a success as it is a sexual revelation and ultimately leads her to be more ambitious in the kinds of scenes she is willing to do. However, her third scene is a nightmare and it makes her rethink her