Caressing and kissing is not possible because it blocks the camera's view of the “really important things”. So no intimacy, just penetration. The aging porn star Dylan (Andrew Howard) is old school – and perhaps that's why downloads of his self-distributed hardcore videos are increasingly declining. His genitals still reach a considerable size; His stage name “Dylan Savage” is no coincidence. However, this now increasingly requires chemical support. One could easily have imagined Dylan as the protagonist of “Truly Naked”, then Muriel d'Ansembourg's feature film debut would probably have turned out something like the porn version of Darren Aronofsky's “The Wrestler”.
Instead, Dylan's teenage son Alec (Caolán O'Gorman) takes center stage. At the same time, “Truly Naked” proves to be a typical, mainstream coming-of-age film that also has a lot of shock potential for the intended general audience. Before the last Berlinale performance, the producer present gave the audience two tips – probably in response to the previous screenings: The sex scenes were all just simulated, so you don't have to leave the hall immediately after the first scene, a hardcore variation of Shirley Eaton's iconic Bond girl appearance in “Goldfinger”. And as far as the octopus is concerned, which will later play an equally important and slimy role, it is guaranteed that no animals were harmed during filming.
Dylan (Andrew Howard) and son Alec (Caolán O'Gorman) relax together after a successful shoot.
Since money has become increasingly scarce, filming has taken place in the living room at home. Alec takes care of the camera, the editing and the Photoshop cover design, in which he retouches his father's lifebuoys and makes the actresses' buttocks even bigger. The son is also responsible for special requests from customers: someone ordered a photo of regular actress Lizzie (Alessa Savage) – now almost like a big sister to Alec – with five smoking cigarettes in her butt hole. But there is no longer enough to pay the rent in London – and so the father-son team moves to a small town on the coast, where Alec is also hoping for a fresh start at school. After all, no one here (!) knows what his father does for a living.
On the one hand, “Truly Naked” follows the tried-and-tested coming-of-age pattern step by step – feel-good factor included: When Alec falls for his feminist-raised classmate Nina (Safiya Benaddi) at his new school, with whom he is supposed to give a presentation on, of all things, online porn addiction, it is just as sweet as you would expect from a film like this. At the same time, the dark subject matter repeatedly intrudes in a disturbing way into the inherently airy teenage love story: Alec ejaculates on his partner the first time without her consent – as he is used to from filming. It is an increasing problem that young people have seen countless amounts of porn before their first sexual experiences. But what's it like if you've already made countless porn videos before your first time?
Because there is no longer enough money for a professional cameraman, Alec took over the filming with regular actress Lizzie (Alessa Savage).
“Truly Naked” portrays Alec, Dylan and Lizzie as a dysfunctional, yet lovable family of choice. The fact that Dylan has sex in front of his underage son and therefore actually belongs in prison is largely ignored beyond Alec's intimacy problems. Nevertheless, Muriel d'Ansembourg – similar to Ninja Thyberg in “Pleasure” a few years ago – clearly takes an anti-porn stance, without blindly condemning the makers or even the actors themselves at the same time. Given the good-or-bad porn discourse in feminist cinema that has been going on for decades, “Truly Naked” only scratches the surface, but it is surprisingly daring to do a lot, especially for an audience film.
Only once does the film resort to a cheap trick: When a young woman who Dylan cast from the street stops filming because she is overwhelmed, which is obviously difficult for her due to her acute lack of money, you can still see her taking a child seat from her back seat as she leaves. Luckily, it's just a one-time outage – and then the shipping company rings the doorbell with a huge water tank…
Conclusion: feel-good cinema with shock appeal.
We saw “Truly Naked” at the Berlinale 2026, where it celebrated its world premiere in the Perspectives section.