Sofia Kappel

Pleasure offers confrontational hard-to-watch fare. Immensely controversial upon its belated release, Swedish writer/director Ninja Thyberg’s bold narrative feature will continue to invite debate for its explicit portrayal and implicit indictment of the adult entertainment (porn, to be exact) business.

Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature Pleasure pushes the boundaries between objective storytelling and voyeurism, and it does so with a heavy dose of realism, including a majority of the cast coming from the adult film industry itself, which makes the film both absorbing and very hard to watch. It’s impossible not to feel a sense of dread throughout Pleasure, and that is exactly the point.