Watched at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Katerina Zhu first debut is flawed but her approach on the modern world of the sex work industry and the toxicity between people to people is decently explored. Crafting a character study about how the line of sex work can change with people, and their lives within the same time is being at displayed. Katerina Zhu's ambitious direction and performance is pretty good as she is passionate to tell this story. Especially with the characters and the decisions made, Zhu understands what she wants to tell and many of the aspects are told successfully and throughly.
I do appreciate Zhu's realistic approach with the characters and the themes explored. It helps to gain an insight to what things are happening and some of the uncomfortable moments to occur. Of course, it does suffer from some tedious pacing and certain characters don't feel flushed out as I would have liked.
But as a whole, I feel like Zhu has done a good job. It's not going to work for everyone but it did for me.
