Director: Mikko Mäkelä
A young novelist's research method becomes the plot itself in Sebastian, Mikko Makela's 2024 drama set in London's literary and nightlife circles.
What is Sebastian about?
Max is twenty-five, unpublished, and convinced his novel needs a subject he can't fully imagine from the outside, so he starts taking on clients under an assumed name to gather material firsthand. What begins as fieldwork for a manuscript gradually becomes a second identity that follows him into interviews, deadlines, and friendships he'd rather keep separate from his nights of sex work. As the book takes shape, the line between observation and lived experience keeps blurring, forcing Max to decide how much of his double life he is willing to fold into the pages he's writing, and how much of it has already changed who he is outside them.
Cast & crew
Ruaridh Mollica plays Max, carrying nearly every scene as the story follows him between his daytime writing life and his nighttime alias. Hiftu Quasem and Jonathan Hyde appear as people navigating the literary side of Max's world, while Ingvar E. Sigurdsson, Dylan Brady, Pedro Minas, Matthias Moret, and Akbar Kurtha round out the cast across his other encounters.
Context & significance
Sebastian is a co-production spanning Belgium, Finland, France, and the United Kingdom, directed and written by Finnish filmmaker Mikko Makela. It holds a 6.7 rating on IMDb, among the stronger scores in this batch, reflecting a drama that critics generally treated as a serious character study rather than a shock-value premise. At 110 minutes, the film stays close to Max's perspective throughout, favoring quiet observation over melodrama.
Where & how to watch
Sebastian is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, reading this page and browsing the catalog costs nothing. This title includes a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, part of K-Time's Farsi-first experience built for the Iranian diaspora.