Berlin delivered a particularly punishing winter this year, with more snow on the ground than I can remember since I moved to the city. It’s the kind of weather that evokes the Sundance Film Festival (which I’ve been unable to attend in person these past few years), and appropriate, perhaps, for a Berlinale that once again offered an uneven slate, with genuine discoveries alongside baffling misfires. What follows are my thoughts on three more films from this year’s program, ranging from compelling to genuinely insufferable.
Truly Naked
Directed by Muriel d’Ansembourg
Going into Truly Naked, I knew virtually nothing about Dutch director Muriel d’Ansembourg, but the premise was enough to intrigue me: how does someone raised with pornography as a mundane fact of daily life learn to build genuine connections with people who come from an entirely different world? It’s a thornier question than it might initially appear, and to d’Ansembourg’s credit, the film largely resists the easy answers.
Alec (Caolán O’Gorman) is a quiet, introverted teenager who doubles as cameraman, editor, and general logistics coordinator for his father Dylan’s (Andrew Howard) homegrown adult content operation. He’s good at it — rather unnervingly so, given his age — and when the family relocates to a small seaside town, the careful partition he maintains between his home life and his school life starts to crack, particularly once he’s paired with outspoken feminist Nina (Safiya Benaddi) for a class project on porn addiction.
There’s a shy, unexpected sweetness to Alec that O’Gorman plays note-perfect. He’s not damaged goods, neither is he a cautionary tale; he’s just a kid who’s absorbed a very specific and very warped version of intimacy. His chemistry with Benaddi (also superb in her debut) feels genuine and well-earned, but what I found most compelling is the relationship between Alec and his father. Dylan loves his son, wants the best for him, and is genuinely trying to balance that with the only life he’s ever known. Painting the aging porn star dad as an abusive villain would have been the path of least resistance; instead, Howard finds something more interesting and more uncomfortable in the role.
The film stumbles a bit in its third act, when a late sequence involving Dylan pushing his longtime collaborator Lizzie (adult actress Alessa Savage) into increasingly extreme territory feels jarring; likewise, Lizzie goading Nina into a reversal of power dynamics with Dylan feels unsettling, considering the younger character’s age. But these are rough edges of a genuinely winning debut. Despite its graphic subject matter, Truly Naked is ultimately a sweet film about an unconventional family, and two teenagers figuring out what real connection actually looks like.
Rosebush Pruning
Directed by Karim Aïnouz
I’ll confess I walked into Rosebush Pruning with high expectations. The involvement of screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, the architect of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Greek Weird Wave period (for better and occasionally worse), was enough to pique my interest, and the cast sealed the deal: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Tracy Letts, and, in a key supporting role I won’t spoil here, Pamela Anderson.
On paper, this seems like an embarrassment of riches. On screen, it’s something else entirely.
Set in a remote Spanish villa, the film traps an obscenely wealthy American family together in the years following their mother’s death. She was apparently torn apart by a pack of wolves, and the remaining family members honor this occurrence by returning to the site of her death every year and leaving a freshly butchered goat at the scene, then sitting in a car nearby to observe the wolves feeding. Weird as hell, to be sure, but quite tame when compared to the series of transgressive provocations the film hurls at the audience for what might have been the most excruciating ninety minutes I’ve ever spent in a theater.
If incest, patricide-adjacent psychosexuality, and a sequence involving a blind man’s nightly tooth-brushing routine that I genuinely cannot bring myself to describe here are the kinds of things that might cause you to walk out of a theater, consider yourself warned. The whole thing carries the faint whiff of someone who studied Lanthimos’ early work closely enough to replicate its surface texture while completely missing what made those films actually work. Here, there’s nothing beneath the surface: the shock is the point.
The performances are, objectively, mostly fine. But the material is so relentlessly, deliberately unpleasant that appreciating the craft becomes nigh impossible. I noticed a significant number of walkouts during my screening, and to be honest, when the credits mercifully began to roll I found myself wishing I had abandoned ship along with those colleagues. Rosebush Pruning is the kind of film that mistakes being unwatchable for being brave. There’s a version of this story, with this cast, that could’ve been genuinely provocative. But this isn’t it.
Wolfram
Directed by Warwick Thornton
Set in the early 1930s in Australia’s Northern Territory, Wolfram (the title refers to tungsten, mined in the region during that period, often by Aboriginal children) follows several converging storylines across four chapters: a mother desperately trying to reconnect with her children, two young siblings caught in the orbit of dangerous men, and Philomac (Pedrea Jackson), an eighteen-year-old of mixed heritage living under the thumb of his cold, conflicted father. It’s a lot of narrative thread to manage, and director Warwick Thornton doesn’t always pull it taut with equal success: there are stretches in the middle section where the momentum sags, and a character or two on the periphery who deserved more than they got.
But when the film locks in, it’s genuinely gripping. Primary villain Casey (Erroll Shand) is one of the more effectively drawn antagonists for this type of film, and the casual, almost bored nature of his cruelty makes him considerably more unsettling than a more operatic menace might have been. And Jackson’s Philomac is excellent, carrying the weight of a young man who understands exactly where he stands in a harsh world and is finally deciding what he’s going to do about it.
Like many Australian-set Westerns that have come before, Wolfram is visually stunning: the burnt oranges and dusty yellows of the landscape are often breathtaking, and the layers of dirt and dust that adorn the ramshackle town reminded me of the grimy aesthetic of Deadwood. The film doesn’t shy away from the dehumanization that colonialism turned into a fact of life, which makes some of the more violent scenes particularly uncomfortable, but it’s the small acts of compassion, mostly at the hands of other marginalized characters, that pack the biggest emotional punch. It’s definitely worth a look, if and when it becomes available outside the festival circuit.
Find more of our Berlinale 2026 coverage at this link.