Sebastian review – bland character study | Little White Lies

Sebas­t­ian review – bland char­ac­ter study

02 Apr 2025 / Released: 04 Apr 2025

A close-up portrait of a young man with short brown hair, a thoughtful expression, and piercing blue eyes.
A close-up portrait of a young man with short brown hair, a thoughtful expression, and piercing blue eyes.
3

Anticipation.

Promises to be a sex-positive take on modern sex work and its destigmatisation.

2

Enjoyment.

These characters are merely flat vessels for the film to project its themes upon.

2

In Retrospect.

Never really dives into the interesting parts of its juxtaposition between reality and fiction.

A young, Lon­don-based writer begins a dou­ble life as a sex work­er in Mikko Mäkelä’s queer psy­cho­log­i­cal drama.

As an aspir­ing nov­el­ist, Max (Ruar­idh Mol­li­ca) faces a strug­gle that most writ­ers in their twen­ties know all too well, hav­ing to earn their liv­ing by review­ing the work of oth­ers and com­mit­ting to short-form medi­ums when all they want to be doing is work­ing on the big one. Reas­sur­ing his pub­lish­er that he’s com­mit­ted to bring­ing a fresh, shame­less per­spec­tive to sex work in the dig­i­tal age”, the sub­ject mat­ter of the nov­el he’s devel­op­ing, what Max doesn’t share is that this is real­ly a work of aut­ofic­tion. He enters the realm of sex work using Sebas­t­ian’ as a pseu­do­nym, and relies only on encoun­ters with clients as entry points to his prose.

Beyond his lit­er­ary ambi­tion, enjoy­ment of sex work and arro­gance – as get­ting pub­lished seems to mat­ter to him more than engag­ing deep­er with his mate­r­i­al – there’s not much else to this pro­tag­o­nist. We nev­er get a good sense of who he is as a per­son or a writer as he plays into eye-rolling clichés, tedious­ly namecheck­ing lit­er­ary fig­ures, pub­lish­ing hous­es and the like.

Sebas­t­ian grad­u­al­ly trans­forms into some­thing more sub­stan­tial when reach­ing towards a point about the cross-gen­er­a­tional relay­ing of queer his­to­ries, but ulti­mate­ly is too pre­oc­cu­pied with con­struct­ing a shal­low char­ac­ter study to delve into more nuanced ter­rain. Iron­i­cal­ly enough, when Max’s edi­tor asks him to raise the stakes in his nar­ra­tive, that feed­back doesn’t seem to echo beyond the pages of Mäkelä’s screenplay.

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