Bella Thorne Showcases Her Growing Talent as a True Multimedia Artist With Her New Film For Pornhub, ‘Her & Him’

Bella Thorne — actress, rapper, fashion and makeup mogul, poetess-author, model, record label manager, all-around notable person — has now added “director” to her CVS-receipt-sized résumé. After getting her feet wet with a couple music videos for ex-boyfriend Mod Sun, she’s at long last assembled a proper narrative project in the thirty-one-minute short film Her & Him. An alumnus of the Sundance Film Festival, Thorne has gone a slightly more unexpected route and premiered her proper debut as auteur at Das Internationales Filmfest Oldenburg in Germany — that is, before the film arrived at its final streaming home: PornHub Premium.

The adults-only video hosting site tapped Thorne for their Visionaries Director’s Club series, a program in which promising talents receive a budget and resources to use as they wish, under the condition that the finished product include at least some measure of unsimulated sexual activity. PornHub’s official copy describes the initiative as intended “to diversify porn production and help create more varied content with multiple types of viewers in mind.” And indeed, the twenty-one-year-old Thorne brings a novel cinematic vocabulary to the XXX world, in which she envisions the sparingly depicted sex as an accessory to a grander thesis about connection and volatility that she’s developed across multiple platforms over a course of years.

Most porn orients itself around the spectacle of pleasure, as filtered through any number of channels for desire; Thorne operates in reverse, beginning with thematic preoccupation and fitting carnality into it. Instead of leaning on penetration as its central support beam, her film stands independent of its pair of brief, tactfully obscured sex scenes. Thorne shoots sex to emphasize the dynamic between her performers, and widens the frame just enough for us to see everything.

Thorne’s recently released book The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray spewed a stream of tormented consciousness at readers, offering a portal into a mind under extraordinary strain. She made sideways reference to the stressors of losing her father at a young age, being under constant media scrutiny, coping with the lingering influence of abuse, and the trickle-down toxicity these factors can bring to romantic entanglements in her adult life. That last one primarily informs Her & Him, which arrives on the heels of a whirlwind period dutifully documented by the tabloids. While Thorne and her new beau Benjamin Mascolo have been spotted head over heels throughout this summer, she ended a polyamorous relationship with hip-hop upstart Mod Sun (who contributes incidental music to this production, implying mended bridges) and YouTube personality Tana Mongeau earlier this year. Instagram posts vaguely alluding to turmoil between them gave the impression of infatuation turned acrimonious, a notion that runs wild through Thorne’s imagination in her latest creative endeavor.

The unnamed leads portrayed by Abella Danger (well-cast for her dusky, emotive voice) and Small Hands (with his tattoos and bad-boy good looks, seemingly Thorne’s type) seem to be an ordinary couple like any other at first glance. He wakes up after a rough night to find Her playing house, or at least her version of it, which involves getting a drive-thru veggie burger — ah, Los Angeles! — and presenting it on a plate like it’s a home-cooked meal. This notion of playacting domesticity curdles into a parody of itself as their exchange continues and we learn that the couple is anything but the sex-punk Lucy and Desi of the initial impression. They’re locked in a destructive game that might not be a game, where pleasure and violence coexist, and not always harmoniously.

They get off on trading power back and forth, a relatively standard schematic for eroticism. Things start to break down when the parameters of their oscillating between domination and submission blur the line between just playing around and the real. He makes the astute observation that something may be off when he notices an online search on Her phone (with the Google stand-in Gargle, its logo formed from curled penises) for the phrase “how to kill your boyfriend and get away with it.” Is she toying with him, or have they really tumbled into a Hitchcockian kiss-me-or-kill-me dysfunction straight out of Spellbound? More importantly, would the discovery that they’ve slipped from pretending to actually enacting frighten him off, or perversely draw him in with the promise of a new extreme?

Contradictions fuel their mating-eagle-death-spiral, with Thorne adroit about the way that lust as well as devotion to another person can distort your rationality. Everything achieves the opposite of its intended purpose purpose: the hint of life-threatening peril only lures Him in, the tea that She brings him as a token of tender loving care scalds his lips, and as he explains after ejaculating later on, “You know, when you tell me not to come, it’s so hot, it just makes me want to come more.” Thorne’s experiments with color mesh with this breakdown of logic, creating an atmosphere bordering on the surreal very much in keeping with her well-documented “psychedelic home decor.” On a strictly technical level, however, she’s got room left to grow. Thorne runs up against porn’s age-old, insurmountable challenge of coherently recording dialogue over the sound of a running shower, and loses precious audio to background hiss.

Fortunately for the director, she largely communicates through an audiovisual language reliant on formal suggestion over statement. Images and gestures hold more purchase in her method than words; I would place her in line with the likes of Robert Bresson and Hou Hsiao-Hsien at most semi-facetiously, as she appropriates their principles of withholding meaning and emphasizing association through editing for her own purposes. The academic Colin Burnett once described “optical transition devices” in Bresson and Hou’s work, a concept that Thorne bastardizes to link her themes of attraction and repulsion. Like so much of the best porn, this film would still play comprehensibly with the volume turned all the way down to furtive-masturbation levels.

Judging from the user comments on PornHub’s official upload, some hairy-palmed viewers have had a mixed reception for Thorne’s techniques, preferring something more straightforward and graphic. They object to an adult film willing to make its audience do a little bit of the work, in which the camera lingers on faces and meaningful motions — a grasping hand, twisting muscles — instead of the square peg meeting the square hole. The many responses that express disappointment in Thorne herself for not appearing on the other side of the camera out their appraisals as coming from misplaced expectations rather than assessment of what’s at hand. (All the cheekily misrepresentative headlines announcing Bella Thorne making her porn debut are to blame at least in part.)

But Thorne herself contextualized her work as a slant on Romeo and Juliet, an assessment with which I must respectfully take issue. The star-crossed lovers dedicated themselves to one another despite every external factor holding them back, whereas the friction between Her and Him has been generated internally. True, these relationships are joined by their mercurial slide between passion and danger, but the terms of those feelings couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. Shakespeare’s amorous teens only needed one another, ready to shut out the rest of the world. Her and Him may not survive the time they spend together.

What they have in common is a high quotient of drama, the endlessly compelling motivational force behind so much of Thorne’s explosive output. Regardless of the format, regardless of platform, regardless of medium, a work by Bella Thorne can only ever be that — a work by Bella Thorne, nothing more and nothing less. What she might currently lack in discipline she more than makes up for with sheer creative assurance. She has an eye and she has ideas, and she’s learning how to express them at an angle through the mediating influence of narrative (as opposed to the directness of her unlocked-diary writing, or the bluntness of her songcraft). She’s growing into an identity as a true multimedia artist, all the more captivating for her intimate imperfections.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.