This year’s Sundance Film Festival looked a little different this year. Rather than gathering the film industry’s elite in Utah, the festival has gone online, allowing more people than ever to get in on the hottest new cinema of the year. That gave Pleasure, a film about a young woman’s rise to prominence in the porn industry directed by Ninja Thyberg, a larger-than-usual audience to shock.

Thyberg created a short film back in 2013 by the same name—”Pleasure”—that screened at Cannes in 2013. But she apparently was drawn to going deeper, and her new film is the result of a years-long investigation into adult entertainment in America. The Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin wrote, “In the press notes, Thyberg writes about initially approaching the subject as an anthropologist, but gradually found herself getting closer to the people in the industry.” 

Thyberg “researched the film by immersing herself in the porn scene,” reported Owen Glieberman for Variety. “She has said that most of the incidents we see in the movie are based on things she witnessed.” And she worked with the people she’d gotten to know. Far from being yet another mainstream film about porn that gets it all wrong, Thyberg dug deep in her research and then recruited a cast of nearly all industry insiders: Revika Anne Reustle, Evelyn Claire, Chris Cock, Dana DeArmond, Kendra Spade, Jason Toker, Lance Hart, Mark Spiegler, and Eva Melander make up the bulk of the cast. It’s only the film’s lead, Sofia Kappel, a young actor from Sweden who has never appeared on film before, who hasn’t made her name in porn.

And, according to the reviews, its her newness to acting that forms the center of the film as her character, Linnéa (screen name Bella Cherry), “realizes that the climb to stardom is far more grueling that [sic] she imagined,” wrote Carlos Aguilar for RogerEbert.com. “Determined to succeed, Bella takes on increasingly more extreme scenes to get the attention of top producers.”

To do so, Linnéa must navigate how to advance her own career by navigating the on-screen and off-screen interactions of the porn industry. She finds that the more intense the acts she performs on camera, the higher her star rises. “She’s confronted by men who are paid to act, to one degree or another, like angry horndog masters (the degrees get raised as the film goes on),” wrote Owen Glieberman for Variety. “Yet off camera most of them are polite and professional.”

True to the reality of the industry today, according to Glieberman, “The women are protected by detailed contracts, by agents who talk like Hollywood players, and by getting to perform in rigorously monitored settings; before the video cameras roll, everything is agreed upon.” 

While reviews seem to agree that “Pleasure” takes the reality of porn and female power within it seriously, critics reported, there’s a tense and darker underside to the story. As Glieberman wrote for Variety, “What ‘Pleasure’ show [sic] us is that when a porn star, even a successful one, goes through the looking glass of desire and starts to spend her life on the other side of it, she may be in control of her destiny, but there are so many transactions she has to make—transactions of the body, of the soul, of hate disguised as lust—that she may end up losing sight of who she is.”

This may sound a bit bleak and even damning toward the porn industry, but don’t forget that “naif gets lost on her climb to success” is a well-worn narrative that cinema has applied to nearly every industry that garners fame along with success. And, while I don’t like to see the porn industry slammed by people who want to see it shut down or used as a scapegoat, it sounds as if Thyberg did her research, earned industry insiders’ trust, and did her best to show the industry as it is—warts and all.

“Pleasure” promotional image courtesy of Sundance Institute