Truly Naked

Given the current cultural climate, it’s easy to assume a film about teenage boys and pornography would trigger every conceivable alarm. Truly Naked, however, has no interest in such noise. Muriel d’Ansembourg’s debut feature sidesteps moral panic entirely, opting instead for something entirely unexpected: a portrait of the industry not as taboo or temptation, but as a banal and unglamorous line of work.

Alec (Caolán O’Gorman) has grown up inside that banality. His father, Dylan (Andrew Howard), runs a small adult film studio, and the young man has long been drafted in as unpaid help, absorbing the routines and compromises of the trade without ever quite understanding where it leaves him. A move from London to a coastal town and a budding friendship with his classmate Nina (Safiya Benaddi) prompt Alec to question his unconventional upbringing.

The film’s more radical gesture lies in recognising that pornography is not the unfathomable entity it is often taken to be. D’Ansembourg presents it as mundane work – discussed in terms of budgets, logistics and clicks – it recedes into the background thematically even when the scenes are front and centre, allowing the film to focus on Alec’s real problems: foremost, his father, who, with his gaudy satin shirts and silver vape pen, drifts between permissive friend and exploitative boss with little regard for boundaries.

Conflicts between father and son revolve not around sex, but ethics. Alec’s more cautious, humane suggestions are dismissed with blunt reminders that this is a business, not a love affair, an art project or a charity. These tensions unfold against a visual palette of dimly lit, barely furnished rooms and dated, worn-out interiors that double as home and studio, captured in lingering, faintly voyeuristic shots. What emerges is a film far less interested in the industry it depicts than in the emotional damage that accumulates when work, family, and morality are compressed into the same claustrophobic space.