THE STORY – Alec, a soft-spoken, introverted teenager, has always viewed life through the lens of his father’s small-time pornography business where their home doubles as a set. Since his mother’s death, Alec has been drawn deeper into the family business and he now films and edits the content that his rough and ready father, Dylan, produces and stars in. As an aging performer, Dylan is struggling to keep things afloat and relies on girls such as Lizzie, a free-spirited adult entertainer who has become something like an older sister to Alec. As financial pressures mount, Dylan’s swagger begins to unravel, exposing Alec to the growing chaos around him.
THE CAST – Caolán O’Gorman, Andrew Howard, Alessa Savage, Safiya Benaddi & Lyndsey Marshal
THE TEAM – Muriel d’Ansembourg (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 122 Minutes
What happens when intimacy is omnipresent, yet emotional closeness remains elusive, is the quiet provocation at the center of “Truly Naked,” a debut that treats its most explicit subject less as spectacle than as background noise. Here, pornography is not scandalous or transgressive. It is routine. It hums in the walls of the house. It shapes gestures, silences, and expectations. What feels forbidden instead is vulnerability.
Alec (Caolán O’Gorman) has grown up inside this environment without ever fully consenting to it. Soft spoken and withdrawn, he has learned to observe rather than participate, to frame rather than feel. Since the death of his mother, that distance has narrowed. He now shoots and edits the material for his father’s small-time adult business, capturing bodies performing intimacy while remaining deeply estranged from his own. The camera becomes both a shield and a burden, a tool that allows Alec to remain present without ever being seen. His father, Dylan (Andrew Howard), is a man clinging to a version of masculinity that no longer quite holds. Once confident and physically commanding, he now performs against time as much as against the market. Dylan’s swagger masks desperation. Financial pressure erodes his authority, and his relationship with Alec slips into codependency. He needs his son not just professionally but emotionally, even as he fails to offer him stability in return. Howard plays Dylan with a volatile mix of charm and decay, suggesting a man aware of his own obsolescence yet unable to imagine another self.
The household is, however, not without tenderness. Lizzie (Alessa Savage), a free-spirited performer who works with Dylan, brings much-needed warmth and humor. Her relationship with Alec feels genuinely affectionate and unusually gentle. She treats him not as an extension of his father or as a voyeur, but as someone deserving of care. These moments offer the clearest glimpse of the film’s emotional thesis: Intimacy is not defined by nudity or sex but by trust and ease. Savage’s presence grounds the story and gives it its most human rhythms.
When mounting debts force father and son to relocate from London to a sleepy seaside town, the move promises distance from the past. For Alec, it represents the possibility of becoming ordinary. He tries to make friends without revealing where he comes from, attempting to construct a self unmarked by the industry that raised him. That fragile reinvention begins to crack when he meets Nina (Safiya Benaddi), a classmate whose feminist outlook and emotional directness stand in sharp contrast to the coded world Alec inhabits. Their relationship unfolds cautiously. Nina does not romanticize Alec’s background, nor does she immediately condemn it. Instead, she asks questions he has never learned how to answer. What does it mean to be close to someone without performing for them? What does it mean to be seen without a lens mediating the encounter? Benaddi plays Nina with clarity and conviction, resisting the temptation to become a symbol rather than a person. She is not a savior figure but a challenge, forcing Alec to confront how little he understands about intimacy beyond its visual representation.
Director Muriel d’Ansembourg approaches this material with evident care. Explicit scenes are framed with intention rather than voyeurism and the use of an intimacy coordinator is felt in the controlled tone of the encounters. The adult film world is neither glamorized nor demonized. It exists as context, not thesis. The director’s stated interest lies in human connection rather than pornography itself. Still, the ambition of “Truly Naked” sometimes outpaces its structure. The narrative moves forward unevenly, introducing ideas about masculinity, consent, labor, and emotional inheritance without giving these complex themes the necessary amount of time room to deepen. Dylan’s unraveling becomes repetitive, circling the same emotional beats without significant variation.
The pacing in the latter half feels rushed. Emotional shifts arrive quickly, as if the film is eager to reach its conclusions before fully inhabiting the messiness it so carefully establishes. There is a sense that years of research and thematic intention have been compressed into a framework that cannot quite contain them. Scenes resonate individually but struggle to accumulate momentum. Where the work ultimately succeeds is in the atmosphere. “Truly Naked” captures the exhaustion of overexposure and the loneliness of being surrounded by bodies while remaining untouched, led by O’Gorman’s performance, which is quietly compelling. He resists easy catharsis, allowing Alec’s confusion to linger unresolved. His stillness becomes expressive, suggesting a young man fluent in images yet deeply uncertain about feeling.
As a coming-of-age story, this is less about transformation than it is about recognition. Alec does not emerge healed or whole. He simply begins to understand the cost of keeping himself hidden. That restraint feels honest even when it leaves the experience slightly incomplete. “Truly Naked” is thoughtful and imperfect, marked by genuine sensitivity and structural hesitation. It asks urgent questions about intimacy in a world saturated with images, but does not always trust itself to sit with those questions long enough. The result is a debut that is often compelling and occasionally frustrating, more convincing in its moments than in its entirety.
