Sebastian review – bland character study

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.