The Sessions

Ben Lewin's film follows Mark O'Brien, a Berkeley poet and journalist who has lived much of his life inside an iron lung following childhood polio. In his late thirties, and with the quiet encouragement of his parish priest, he decides to pursue sexual experience and engages a sex surrogate who agrees to a limited number of meetings.

Serious critics responded to the film's candour and its refusal of sentimentality around sex and the body. John Hawkes plays O'Brien almost entirely through face and voice, his body held still, and the restraint gives the comedy and the longing real weight. Helen Hunt, as the surrogate, meets him with a composure that keeps the encounters honest rather than coy.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film holds steady attention on disability and desire, on the shame that gathers around a body medicalised since childhood, and on intimacy approached in careful, negotiated stages. It is attentive to how the priest, the attendants and the surrogate each occupy different positions in O'Brien's inner life, and to what it can cost to ask for help.