'Pleasure' Trailer Examines The Porn Industry's Ups And Downs

In the past few years, more mainstream films have started to grapple with the sex industries and the people who work in them. From Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, to Janicza Bravo’s ZOLA, to Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, Hollywood is becoming more conscious of the cultural impact of different kinds of sex work. Pleasure, a drama from Swedish director Ninja Thyberg that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, explores the ups and downs of the modern-day porn industry in Los Angeles.

The first trailer for Pleasure introduces us to Linnéa (Sofia Kappel), a young Swedish woman going by the name of Bella Cherry who moves to LA to pursue porn superstardom. As she excels in the industry, she starts getting booked for increasingly extreme scenes. The trailer shows Cherry on set, making friends with a fellow actress, and hinting at the lengths she’ll go to in order to achieve fame. Really, it’s an age old tale of heading out West in pursuit of the American dream, but with on-camera sex mixed in.

Many of the actors in Pleasure have previous experience in porn, and according to Thyberg, many of the scenes in Pleasure were incidents she witnessed while immersing herself in the industry as research. Thyberg was nominated for best director at the Independent Spirit Awards for the film.

Watch the trailer for Pleasure, out in theaters via Neon on May 13th, below: