Sequin in a Blue Room

Don’t sleep on this fast-paced and the­mat­i­cal­ly juicy Aus­tralian indie by debut direc­tor Samuel Van Grinsven, which sees a bored 16-year-old school­boy (Conor Leach) live out a dou­ble life as a gay hus­tler whose online avatar is Sequin.

Announced in the cred­its as ​‘A Homo­sex­u­al Film’, in a nod to icon­ic queer direc­tor Gregg Ara­ki, Sequin in a Blue Room plunges us straight into a world of mobile app-pow­ered sex­u­al hook-ups, as our supreme­ly con­fi­dent pro­tag­o­nist locks down a no-strings sex­u­al liai­son in a mat­ter of seconds.

We learn, how­ev­er, that his pre­ferred modus operan­di is one based on ghost­ing, where each client is a one-and-done affair and their pro­files are blocked as soon as the clinch is over. This leaves many (main­ly old­er) men dis­ap­point­ed and con­fused, but allows Sequin to remain in total, emo­tion-free com­mand of his sex­u­al destiny.

Van Grinsven depicts the var­i­ous online inter­ac­tions with scrolling text that appears on the screen, but does so in a way that is styl­is­ti­cal­ly func­tion­al – empha­sis­ing the trans­ac­tion­al nature of Sequin’s lifestyle and expung­ing it of any kind of fun or glam­our. The whole film is shot with a glassy pre­ci­sion, employ­ing lots of shal­low focus por­traits of bod­ies in close-up, and much gauzy blue and pur­ple neon light to sig­ni­fy a world of hazy enig­mas just sit­ting in the mid­dle distance.

The ​“Blue Room” of the title is the name of a sur­re­al sex par­ty to which Sequin man­ages to snag an invite. It’s a space where nude men writhe in orgas­mic plea­sure behind semi-trans­par­ent tar­pau­lin sheets and no one is allowed to utter a word. Sequin falls in with a mys­tery part­ner and, sud­den­ly, his list­less, pro­duc­tion-line approach to rela­tion­ships doesn’t seem so ide­al any more.

As quick­ly as the par­ty starts, it’s over, and Sequin finds him­self in the same posi­tion as the men he reject­ed who are des­per­ate for anoth­er taste. What starts as an alter­na­tive high-school film about how the dig­i­tal world col­laps­es the gap between gen­er­a­tions, ends up as an effec­tive thriller about lust get­ting the bet­ter of us in the end.

Leach is mag­net­ic and illu­sive in the lead, and Van Grinsven brings this spicy sto­ry togeth­er in a way which is at once com­pelling as a genre film and sex-pos­i­tive as a study of social mores.

Sequin in a Blue Room is released via Pec­ca­dil­lo Pic­tures on dig­i­tal plat­forms from 9 April.