When the Camera Stops Faking: Gender, Performance, and Power in Fuck-a-Fan

"She starts off doing everything men apparently want -- and it ends up about her."

Muriel d'Ansembourg's 2024 short film Fuck-a-Fan, which premiered at Tribeca and screened at the Sydney World Film Festival, begins with a premise designed to provoke: an OnlyFans-style performer launches a contest offering one lucky follower the chance to sleep with her. What unfolds, however, is not fantasy fulfillment -- but a feminist inversion of it. This 24-minute Dutch short becomes an emotionally charged, intimate study of power, projection, and reclamation.

Film stills from Fuck-a-Fan (2024), directed by Muriel d’Ansembourg.

Casting Realness

The film stars Alessa Savage as Chloe Cam -- and her casting is a masterstroke. Known for her work in adult entertainment, Savage brings both industry insight and startling emotional nuance to the role. She isn't just playing a porn star -- she is one, and this performance knowingly complicates the audience's expectations. Rather than reinforcing typecasting, Savage completely subverts it. Her Chloe is confident and caustic, yes -- but also withdrawn, observant, and utterly uninterested in catering to our gaze.

Opposite her is Joes Brauers as Thomas, a fan selected through Chloe's contest. Brauers, a rising Dutch actor (The East, Quo Vadis, Aida?), balances awkward vulnerability with growing emotional neediness. And in a smaller but telling role, Dave MacRae plays Randy, the cameraman, who hovers just outside the emotional sphere -- a reminder of the machinery behind commodified intimacy.

From Porn Premise to Feminist Pivot

Fuck-a-Fan begins like an adult film: artificial lighting, exaggerated sounds, choreographed seduction. But as the layers peel away, the real story emerges -- not about sex, but about who owns the emotional narrative.

Thomas enters expecting connection, craving validation. Chloe, initially performative, gradually shuts the performance down. In a moment of stunning narrative reversal, she climaxes -- and he collapses into emotional and physical fatigue. She is left alone, not abandoned, but awake. Present. Real.

This is not the pornographic script. It's an inversion: a story about a woman who begins as a commodity and ends as a person -- and about a man who learns the cost of mistaking fantasy for emotional truth.

Direction That Refuses the Gaze

Director Muriel d'Ansembourg doesn't just subvert porn; she subverts audience complicity. Her camera is tight, stripped of stylization, and often refuses to deliver the angles expected from such a setup. There's no voyeuristic climax here -- just emotional exposure. In the final moments, Chloe watches Thomas sleep, her face unreadable but unflinching. She's no longer performing -- and the audience no longer knows how to watch her.

Film stills from Fuck-a-Fan (2024), directed by Muriel d’Ansembourg.

Final Thought

Fuck-a-Fan is a provocative, intelligent short that challenges how we think about sex, spectatorship, and female pleasure. In its bold casting of Alessa Savage -- a real-world adult performer reclaiming her narrative -- it blurs the line between performance and truth. The film doesn't ask if porn can be feminist. It answers by becoming the thing porn never is: a story where the woman finishes, and the man disappears.

Review by Carmel Delprat