The Tiff Film Review: Nicole Bazuin’s “Modern Whore”
By Ross
As naked and honest as one could be, “Modern Whore“, premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, immediately disarms with its deeply personal deconstruction, feminist defiance, and startling vulnerability, both physically and emotionally. Based on Andrea Werhun’s ground-breaking memoir and stage show, the docu-film adaptation, directed by Nicole Bazuin, reimagines sex work not as confession or spectacle, but as an act of reclamation — part erotic essay, part cinematic mirror.
Through stylized, fourth-wall-breaking re-enactments, Werhun takes us through her years working as an escort and dancer, a career that began while she was a university student in Toronto. With sharp humour and unapologetic clarity, she revisits encounters that exposed both the thrill and the danger of the work — the lack of protection from predatory clients, and the quieter weight of internalized shame that so often shadows women’s pleasure and agency.
As a psychotherapist, I’m accustomed to engaging with stories that live somewhere heroically between shame and agency; the kind of stories people are rarely invited to share outside of a tight, private, and trusted circle. “Modern Whore” is determined to upend that idea, sharing and clarifying inside that same charged territory.
Bazuin and Werhun collaborate like therapist and patient switching roles — one constructing the safe container, the other testing its limits and expanding its horizons. The camera, alternating between clinical clarity and comic intimacy, becomes a site of negotiation and deliverance. Werhun narrates her experiences as a sex worker with a magnetic intelligence, offering anecdotes that oscillate between intimacy and clever performance; analysis and provocation. Struck by the film’s refusal to translate emotion into apology, the aesthetic polish evokes both the calmness of control and the colorful eroticism of exposure. The film doesn’t plead for understanding or respectability. Instead, it performs self-awareness with cinematic precision, asking: who gets to define empowerment — the subject, the viewer, or the frame itself?
By its final sequence, “Modern Whore” feels authentic, revealing, brave, and dynamic. It doesn’t ask us to psychologize or judge the worker, but it does ask us all to understand the architecture and the nature of the professional act and the storytelling itself. It deftly portrays the darker and more disturbing aspects of sex work, searching for honest ways to validate and celebrate the people who perform it, and they expertly fulfil that ideal by presenting them all as fully complex individuals. The film solidly suggests we look at, most carefully, how we package desire within one of humanity’s oldest professions, and how we perform and engage with power. How we pay attention and how we feel about the faulty representations that surround sex work and sex workers.
“Modern Whore” boldly ventures beyond Werhun’s own story to include experiences and perspectives different from hers as a white cisgender woman, expanding the frame to encompass a wider sex worker community. It does leave out the complex role of male sex workers, but it doesn’t pretend to unpack and understand it all, and from every angle, nor should it. When the credits rolled, I couldn’t help but think of my clients who wrestle daily with being both seen and mis-seen — and how healing sometimes begins not with confession, but with the right to direct one’s own narrative. Bazuin and Werhun offer that with defiance, audacity, and grace.
