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‘Sebastian’ Review: An Aspiring Queer Novelist Loses, Then Rediscovers Himself Through a Double-Life in Sex Work
Mikko Mäkelä’s 'Sebastian,' which debuted at Sundance, employs a bracing naturalism and stars Ruaridh Mollica as a writer leading a double life.
A young Londoner takes on that task and goes through the digital looking glass in Finnish-British writer-director Mikko Mäkelä ’s “ Sebastian,” now in limited release from Kino Lorber after premiering at Sundance earlier this year. It’s a criticism that both he and the film take to heart, as the writer seeks out new material, including a drug-induced orgy and an emotionally supportive relationship with Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), a cultured, opera-loving septuagenarian who has come into his sexuality late in life. Mäkelä seems primed to judge the character in a late conflict, in which a client becomes irate after discovering Max’s fictionalization of their interaction, but the sequence passes without affording the protagonist an opportunity to take any action at all, instead ending with him meekly wandering away.
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