Wri/Dir: Muriel D’Ansembourg | Cast: Caolan O’Gorman, Andrew Howard, Alessa Savage, Safiya Benaddi, Lyndsey Marshal | Netherlands, Belgium, France. 2026
Internet addiction takes various different forms: porn, gaming and even gambling: this amusing new satire feels jokier in tone but echoes the award-winning Netflix short series ‘Adolescence’. Truly Naked‘s got bite, stars a live octopus and is sure to be popular due to its subject and a stunningly sensitive breakout performance from Northern Irish actor Caolan O’Gorman.
He is Alec, a likeable, introverted teenager, who can stand up to his school mates but keeps his cool. When he is forced to work with school friend Nina (Safiya Bernaddi) on a project involving internet addiction with a focus on porn, he seems diffident.
Nina is no shrinking violet and is up for the school project but claims she wants to experience sex and love on a more personal level, and tells Alex in no uncertain terms. Dark horse Alex then suddenly comes out of his shell emerging as a pro at the game of shooting porno films largely due to working with his father, a creep of a divorced dad from Hell whose attitude to women channels Jeffrey Epstein (minus the cash) and who runs a struggling pornography business in their local seaside village (claiming disingenuously that it always ‘put a roof over Alec’s head’). There’s also a token school bully, played by Cameron James-King, who baits Alec and lands him in trouble with the head teacher, but this strand is simply a side show to show Alec’s latent power and never really developed.
So in his spare time Alec shoots porn films for his father, and scenes of an explicit nature follow with a girl rocking scanty underwear which soon comes off for the teen’s handheld camera. Once the school project gets off to a start Nina arrives chez Alec and starts interrogating provocatively him about his views on women, explaining that her divorced mum (the lovely Lyndsey Marshal) is a life coach.
Nina is not Alec’s type but his father sniffs new blood for the business and comes over all flirty and cringeworthy with the young girl, sizing her up for potentially porn material. Dad will prove to be a sinister and abusive misogynist who can turn nasty and who rudely sacks one of his porn girls, Alec calling him out on his behaviour: obviously his divorced mother has done a good job bringing him up with a healthy attitude to love and sex and showing him how to connect with someone so he can discover real intimacy.
Nina and Alec soon fall for each other but the course of love never runs smoothly – and certainly doesn’t involve a live octopus – and this is all captured tenderly by DoP Myrtle Mosterman in BAFTA-winning Muriel D’Ansembourg’s dazzling debut feature, a disturbing but hopeful new film, sure to be a big hit at the box office.
Muriel D’Ansembourg is a real rising star in the film firmament her films finding unexpected sensuality in taboo spaces, exploring intimacy in boundary-pushing narratives that challenge conventions, her short films having won 36 awards, Fuck-A-Fan premiered at Tribeca and was praised for its fearless, honest of female sexuality, according to the festival blurb.
BERLINALE 2026 | Perspectives 16 February 22’