Modern Whore

An impassioned and insightful rebuttal to the assumptions, misconceptions, and faulty representations that surround sex work and sex workers, Modern Whore may also be the most audacious and engaging movie ever made about the oldest profession.

Successfully expanding on their 2020 short film and book of the same name, director Nicole Bazuin and subject and co-writer Andrea Werhun take viewers on a very eventful journey through Werhun’s experiences as an escort and exotic dancer, a career she began when she was a university student in Toronto. As Werhun recounts with great flair and frankness in the film’s stylized, fourth-wall-breaking re-enactments, there were many lessons to be learned and challenges to be faced, including the lack of protection from toxic clients and her own internalized versions of the shame that society associates with female pleasure and the sex industry.

Though Modern Whore doesn’t flinch from portraying the darker and more disturbing aspects of sex work, its greater aim is to validate and celebrate the people who perform it, presenting them as fully complex individuals. The film also ventures beyond the scope of Werhun’s career to include experiences and perspectives that are different from her own as a white cisgendered woman, resulting in a wider view of the sex worker community.

Werhun’s wealth of insight and her work as an activist and advocate has already impacted such films as Anora (TIFF ’24), for which she served as a consultant and whose director Sean Baker is one of Modern Whore’s executive producers, and Paying for It (TIFF ’24), in which she also acted. Yet even when compared with those narrative companion pieces, the writer’s latest collaboration with Bazuin may be both wiser and wilder.

JASON ANDERSON

Content advisory: coarse language, drug use, mature themes, nudity, sexual content, themes of sexual violence