‘Sebastian’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Mikko Makela. Belgium/UK/Finland. 2024. 113mins

A secret double-life becomes a source of liberation and transformation in Sebastian, writer/director Mikko Makela’s second feature whch offers an intriguing exploration of sex, identity, restraint and abandon. The fearless lead performance from Ruraridh Mollica really gets under the skin of the complex central figure and should elevate him to rising star status. Sebastian, premiering in Sundance, should readily connect with queer audiences and specialist distributors.

 The film is sex positive and explicit without feeling gratuitous

Makela’s micro-budget debut feature A Moment In The Reeds (2017) was nominated for the BIFA Discovery Award and for two Finnish Jussi Awards. His follow-up is an assured drama with echoes of Jekyll And Hyde and Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage/Wild (2018) in the story of one man and his two identities. When we first see Sebastian (Mollica) we assume this is his first time as a sex worker. Pale and anxious, he claims to be 24 years-old and hailing from Edinburgh. He gives everything to please his corpulent, older client. Afterwards, there is a look in his eyes questioning what just happened and wondering how he became that person. 

In the ’real world’, Sebastian is Max, an ambitious, aspiring Scottish writer now living in the London, who freelances for a magazine and is about to have his first short story published in Granta. He is trying to craft his first novel, and has joined the website Dreamy Guys to experience the life of an escort, telling himself that his time as Sebastian is purely for research purposes. Preparing for a coveted interview with Bret Easton Ellis, he takes some inspiration from a writer often accused of moulding autobiography into eye-catching fiction.

Cinematographer Iikka Salminen (who also shot A Moment In The Reeds) captures a moody, bright-lights, big-city portrait of London as a place where countless strangers guarantee anonymity. Max has friends and connections, including best pal Amna (Hiftu Quasem),  but is often shown in a club or on the street as a lone figure in the crowd. Makela’s screenplay gently skewers some of the pretensions and insecurities of the London literary scene with its fickle agents and earnest young writers desperately hoping to become the next hot thing. 

Max approaches his time as Sebastian like an actor preparing for a role. He shaves his chest, works out at the gym and scrutinises his features in the mirror before another encounter. His clients are also participating in a kind of performance, as they enjoy the release of no-strings sex with a willing young man; the film is sex positive and explicit without feeling gratuitous. Sebastian attracts older clients, who are relieved that he has been truthful about his age and boyish good looks. “It’s so nice that not everyone is deceptive,” says one satisfied customer

Mollica successfully traces the subtle differences between Sebastian and Max. The aspiring writer Max is the less sympathetic of the two; there is an arrogance in his ambition and a disregard for the feelings of others. Sebastian is sweet and naive, eager to please and energetic in bed. Sebastian dares himself, walking into dangerous situations that may have been what he wanted all along. He becomes a way of trying on a different version of himself – one that is more vulnerable, less timid and ultimately more authentic.  The film finds some of its most plaintive moments when his worlds collide; an awkward chance encounter with a client or a call from his mother who just worries about him being all alone in the big city. 

Mollica is strongly supported by an experienced cast. Jonathan Hyde brings a touching dignity to the role of Nicholas, a cultured, lonely older man delighted to find someone like Sebastian warming the autumn of his years. Ingvar Sigurdsson is similarly impressive as Daniel, a married, family man whose desire for Sebastian becomes a strictly commercial transaction.

Scattered with references to French culture (Max watches Pialat’s A Nos Amours and discusses Cyril Collard’s Les Units Fauves), Sebastian shows Makela creating a British film with a very European sensibility and a performance from Ruaridh Mollica that should put him on the map.