SEBASTIAN (2024)

A 25-year-old aspiring writer living in London begins a double life as a sex worker in order to research his debut novel.

by Amelia Harvey 2nd April 20252nd April 2025 Leave a reply

British writer-director Mikko Mäkelä sensitively portrays a young Scottish gay man’s life working as a freelance journalist by day and a sex worker by night. The slow drama Sebastian deals with the highs and lows sex work can offer someone and the impact sexual vulnerability has on a person’s self-esteem.

Aspiring novelist Max (Ruaridh Mollica) spends his days turning in half-hearted features as a freelance writer for a culture magazine. He thinks the work is beneath him, instead hoping to become a published author. When he decides he wants to concentrate on writing about sex workers, he makes a point to experience that life himself.

Max, who goes under the pseudonym ‘Sebastian’, keeps an active profile on an internet-facilitated sex work website called Dreamy Guys. After every encounter, he incorporates the conversation and experiences into his fiction writing. The film remembers the tactile and intimate moments of these meetings, concentrating less on the physicality of sex and more on the vulnerability between the two men. Strangers are happy to give away the most intimate details about their lives when naked with someone whose services they paid for online.

Although the sex scenes are graphic, they never feel voyeuristic or gratuitous. The scenes are normal, sometimes portrayed as hot, messy, and occasionally disappointing for all involved. Sebastian smoothly treads the line between sexy and realistic, yet never seedy. It’s a relief that this movie never indulges the sad, self-loathing tropes queer cinema appears to be infatuated with.

Just as the cycle of office work in the day and sexual encounters in the evening become mechanical to the audience, one of Max’s writing tutors tells him his writing is becoming repetitive. This forces both the movie and Max to switch up, seeking new ways to fulfil his ambition. He starts to engage in more dangerous practices, attending orgies, taking drugs and meeting up with older partners.

The set-up may lend itself to something more sinister, with the young gay man putting himself in more and more dangerous situations. But Sebastian doesn’t want to tell another tragic story about the sex industry or give the audience a fable about the perils of being gay in the city. His encounters are predominantly safe and respectful, with Max being the one who is unaware of his own boundaries.

Max starts his endeavour in the hopes of learning about other people, he in fact starts to learn about himself. As he breaks all confidentiality and writes about the evenings spent with men who are both in and out of the closet, he becomes addicted to exposing himself further and further. The film loosely explores how people can write themselves into becoming new people and how the lines between internal and external personas can blend.

The success of Sebastian relies solely on Ruaridh Mollica’s performance. He’s attractive and youthful-looking, effortlessly portraying Max’s naivety about the dangers he’s putting himself in. Mollica spends much of the film alone or with one other scene partner, and the camera often is closely focused on his face. While his alter ego, Sebastian, is vulnerable and soft, his real self (or his work persona) is arrogant and bolshy. Mollica’s micro-expressions carry his character through sometimes stilted dialogue and sell the sex scenes.

Mollica’s performance perfectly separates Max and Sebastian through minor changes in tone and mannerisms. The difference between the two versions of Max is subtle but noticeable. Mollica plays Max at work as being cocky, pretentious and often quite unlikeable. As Sebastian, he’s a softer and more sympathetic character. Some of the film’s more interesting moments are when his two worlds collide, and he struggles to understand which version of him is his true self.

Sebastian is far more interesting when it explores Max’s nighttime activities. London’s literary scene hits all the clichés of fickle agents, earnest young writers and personality-lacking publishing parties. This world doesn’t feel real, so rooting for Max to find his place as a professional writer can be a struggle. He feels more comfortable in nightclubs and in bedrooms than he does sitting in his editor’s office. If the film is trying to make this point, it fails to do so.

Max’s world also feels small, perhaps purposefully so. Cinematographer Iikka Salminen (who worked with the director on his previous film, Moment In the Reeds) makes London feel sterile, with bright lights and cold architecture. The lead is often seen alone, never quite comfortable in a crowd despite having friends in the city, including the thinly written Amna (Hiftu Quasem).

The film wears its pretentiousness on its sleeve, often referring to high-brow literature and French cinema. These references don’t always feel organic, often appearing like the filmmaker wants to let the audience know that he’s smarter than they are. At times, Sebastian feels painfully aware of what it’s doing and deliberately pulls away from it. There is nothing wrong with bending the genre norms, but the film fails to replace them with anything of worth.

Sebastian struggles with its pacing and flow. It’s purposefully mechanical and repetitive in the opening act, with the characters even calling out the boring writing. The second act fails to understand what it wants to say and how it wants to say it. The third act falls especially flat, with the character’s destination coming across as unearned.

The film doesn’t quite know how to handle the ethics of Max’s quest. Sebastian doesn’t bother to tell audiences where it lands in its opinion of going to such extreme levels in the name of research. At times, the writing judges Max, while at other times, it portrays his vulnerability with a sensitive hand. In his day job, he’s commissioned to interview Brett Easton Ellis, a man known for getting in trouble for blurring reality and fiction. His admiration for Ellis is the closest Sebastian has to making a point, but it’s left to the audience to understand what the point is.

Sebastian has lots of good points to make, but they’re hidden within the film. The idea of the rise of technology being used to form connections and later used to market a book is not explored as much as it could be. At one point, Max hints at the shame he feels in his actions, but the film quickly speeds past it. The search for authenticity in the media and the roles we assign ourselves depending on our surroundings are also hinted at but ignored in favour of ambiguity.

This is a beautifully acted movie that curbs any queer trauma in its exploration of sex work. While it doesn’t want to be another film about the perils of gay sex and meeting men online, it doesn’t say very much about anything else. Somewhere, under the layers of trying too hard, Sebastian is a well-crafted movie about social media, sex, making art and embracing your true self. Sadly, any message gets lost in its directionless writing and lack of pace.

UK • FINLAND • BELGIUM | 2024 | 110 MINUTES | 1.85:1 COLOUR | ENGLISH • FRENCH