The first trail­er for Plea­sure goes deep, deep inside LA’s porn industry

It’s a Hol­ly­wood myth all too famil­iar: a bright-eyed ingénue gets off the bus in Los Ange­les with dreams of star­dom, only to get gob­bled up by a car­niv­o­rous indus­try and spat out the oth­er side. Except that Bel­la Cher­ry is no bump­kin with her sights set on the Oscar stage – the Swedish emi­gré is dead-set on ris­ing to the top of the city’s boom­ing porn biz, what­ev­er it takes. Or so she thinks, as she comes to real­ize once the full, exact­ing def­i­n­i­tion of ​‘what­ev­er it takes.’

The first trail­er for Nin­ja Thy­berg​‘s dar­ing dra­ma Plea­sure, post­ed online just this after­noon, intro­duces us to Sofia Kap­pel as the savvy yet naïve Bel­la. She knows she likes to have sex and be seen doing it, but she’s not ready for a pow­er struc­ture that incen­tivizes push­ing your­self far­ther and far­ther in order to succeed.

The trail­er runs through the beats of her ascent, as she goes from a newb unsure of how to make her but­tocks pop in pho­tos (shades of Nomi Mal­one pro­nounc­ing the designer’s name ​“Ver-sayce”) to a sought-after sub­mis­sive unfazed by the ball gag jammed between her lips. Along the way, a num­ber of real-world porn per­son­al­i­ties make cameo appear­ances as them­selves, includ­ing such fan favorites as actress­es Gina Valenti­na and Abel­la Dan­ger, par­o­dy savant Axel Braun, and overnight queen­mak­er Mark Spiegler.

In her review from the film’s world pre­mière at last year’s Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, our crit­ic on the scene Emi­ly Maskell was strick­en by the frank­ness of Thyberg’s approach. ​“Explic­it from its first moments, Thyberg’s film explores pow­er, sex­u­al­i­ty and friend­ship, adopt­ing a female worker’s‑eye view in a male-dom­i­nat­ed indus­try in order to show that the glossy, pris­tine sets tell a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty to that behind the cam­era,” Maskell wrote. She went on to pre­dict that con­tro­ver­sy would befall the even­tu­al release: ​“With clar­i­ty, the most dire and dis­gust­ing aspects of the porn indus­try are high­light­ed in this tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished if poten­tial­ly divi­sive 18+ feature.”

Her prophe­cy has already come true, with A24’s deci­sion to sell off dis­tri­b­u­tion rights to main com­peti­tor Neon last year, in the wake of a ker­fuf­fle that saw A24 attempt to reed­it the film to achieve an R rat­ing that would allow for more screens in the the­atri­cal run. Looks like Thy­berg will get her wish with her new stu­dio, which will release the film in the US unrat­ed and uncut. The smart mon­ey says that isn’t the last fuss that will be raised over this polar­iz­ing button-pusher.

Plea­sure comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 13 May. A date for the UK has yet to be set.