‘Truly Naked’ Berlinale Review: A Coming-of-Age Story Inside the Adult Film World

Alec is a teenager who works in the adult film industry. Not as a viewer, but behind the scenes: he is part of the business itself. He works for his father, Dylan, a porn actor and producer who appears in his own films and relies on Alec as cameraman and editor. As a result, the boy—shy and kind in his public and school life—spends much of his time at home, which also functions as a filming space, observing his father performing with some of his regular collaborators, whom he casually refers to as his “birds.” This professional dynamic originally began with Alec’s mother, who has since passed away, and whose absence lingers like a quiet presence throughout the film.

Alec (Caolán O’Gorman) has become so accustomed to recording his father’s work that he barely registers it as something intimate or emotionally charged. Outside the house, however, he does everything he can to keep that world hidden. At the school he attends in the small town where they now live—after moving from London—no one knows what the family business is, and Alec is determined to keep it that way. When he’s assigned a multimedia project on addiction, he eventually accepts his teacher’s suggestion to focus on pornography as a subject. He’s paired with Nina (Safiya Benaddi), a forthright, outspoken, and openly feminist classmate who encourages him to reconsider both his understanding of sexuality and the way he relates to it.

After a striking opening scene, the sexual directness of Truly Naked gradually becomes normalized, much as it does for Alec himself. His father, Dylan (Andrew Howard), is a seasoned performer with fairly traditional ideas about his work, and he struggles to accept alternative perspectives. As Alec and Nina grow closer—their relationship complicated by the boy’s approach to intimacy, shaped more by detachment and roughness than by tenderness or emotional openness—his relationship with his father begins to strain. Additional subplots involving school life and the difficult experiences of two women who work for Dylan add further layers to a narrative that, in its own way, questions a patriarchal view of sexuality.

Despite a few scenes and situations that feel excessive or slightly awkward, Truly Naked works effectively as an exploration of the adult film world seen through an unusual perspective: that of adolescents who are, in a sense, privileged witnesses to its most private dynamics. It is Nina who pushes Alec to question aspects of his own life and his relationship with intimacy, and the director invites the audience to undertake a similar reflection. What’s striking—almost paradoxical—is that she does so by moving quite close to the formal language of the genre she is examining.

The English film by the Dutch filmmaker is somewhat episodic and takes on more themes than it fully knows how to manage. Some elements—predictable school bullying, or Nina’s mother, who feels more like a statement than a fully developed character—are less convincing. Most, however, contribute to the film’s critical yet empathetic view of the world it portrays. In that sense, one of the most compelling figures is Lizzie (played by Alessa Savage, an adult film performer in real life), who appears in most of Dylan’s productions and offers a similarly ambivalent perspective on the industry.

The film’s most insightful observations have to do with the act of looking—an idea that opens up reflections not only on sexuality and pornography, but also on cinema itself. Behind the camera, Alec frames bodies according to the elements his father insists are the most marketable. And when he finds himself in a personal intimate situation, his gaze drifts toward those same areas, unable to meet Nina’s eyes. In this dynamic—one that becomes increasingly complex—this direct, candid, yet sensitive English film finds its most effective metaphor, neatly capturing the many tensions, both sexual and otherwise, that are brought into play.