Truly Cringe

Pornography. 

Just the word alone can trigger all kinds of emotions. Outrage. Arousal. Connection. Shock. Adventure. Pornography is the biggest entertainment in the world, but also the most taboo. Everyone comes at it through their own neuroses and hang-ups and turn-ons. Some watch it all the time; some don’t watch it at all. Some people are even gooners. In many ways, it is the most revealing art form, showing who we are behind closed doors, both in front of and behind that laptop screen. 

But in all the films I have watched about porn, or eroticism, or sex, I have never come across one quite like My Friend The Porn Star (Rosa Friedrich, 2026), which brings to mind a novel association with the porn industry. And that’s cringe.

The Austrian director is a curious sort, but it’s evident from the beginning of this strange, meandering and unfocussed documentary that she is an outsider to pornoworld. This gives her a unique perspective regarding the goings-on here, but it also limits her ability to get beyond anything surface-level. The result is the cinematic equivalent of edging, skirting around a subject while never getting to the money shot. 

It starts intriguingly enough, with Rosa deciding to make a documentary about her friend Timo’s efforts to make a different kind of sex film. But despite filming reams of content of the neurotic Austrian talking constantly about his need to capture something essential about his sex life through video, he eventually leaves the entire project, resulting in the janky image of another man’s face deepfaked through AI onto Timo’s body. Curiously, his penis is left intact.  

You can see why Rosa and Timo break up. Their casting plans for his film border on the ridiculous. I guess you can make a porn movie by making friends with “sex-positive” liberals and inviting them for a “casting,” but a smarter approach would, obviously, be putting an advert online and seeing who turns up. But, of course, the type of woman who answers an advert like that is not the type of woman you want in your cool hybrid documentary, because she probably wouldn’t be saying things about “bodies” and “expression,” etc; she would just be wanting to get paid. 

Eventually, they do look for an actual porn star in Budapest, but she gets creeped out by Timo’s desire for greater intimacy than a normal movie would allow, with all the scripted positions and dialogue written out in advance. It presents as if there is a big difference between real sex and porn sex, but only if you are living under a rock and forget that the amateur porn industry eclipses professionally made films rather significantly. 

Things become increasingly bristly, with Rosa spending most of the time seemingly putting the porn industry down while showing a lack of enthusiasm for Timo’s work. Then after her departure, she brings in a bunch of queer, sex-positive and curious friends to make their own short movies about their sexuality. Close-up female masturbation scenes, shadowy kissing, leaps into a river, trans girls cuddling and some frankly off-putting food porn (each to their own!). These girls’ fun and innovative approaches to sex differ significantly from Timo’s neurotic attempts to express “male sexuality,” but they create a binary that feels extremely old-fashioned, especially for a movie that presents as uber-progressive. 

Eventually, bolstered by the upbeat soundtrack and endless conversations about sex-positivity and bodies and taboos and society, yadda yadda yadda, My Friend the Porn Star goes far beyond the reality of sex for most people, and into a more rarefied air, one that surely reflects the realities of certain friend groups in big cities like Vienna or Berlin or London, but far away from any sense of universal reality. 

And Friedrich’s approach borders on the overly cutesy and insincere. While not expecting the film, with its stagey shots, metafictional gimmicks and childlike font choices, to be like a stereotypical porno, its extremely cringeworthy approach to the material came off not just as lame, but almost puritanical — like those sex education videos you are subjected to at school. I came out learning little about how the industry works, and more about how the very specific people who make films that premiere at the Vienna or Berlin Porn Film Festival work. I won’t lie. The women parading at Venus, Europe’s biggest sex expo, which features at the start of the film,  seemed far more interesting subjects. 

For a more sincere take on the industry, albeit messy, check out Truly Naked (Muriel d’Ansembourg, 2026) instead.