Daniel O’Reilly co-writes and stars in a psychological thriller about addiction, shame, and the urgent need for men to ask for help. Directed by Giles Alderson, it arrives on digital download on 27th November.
From the outside, Richie has it all. A new wife. A baby on the way. A best friend who always knows how to turn the volume up. It is a picture-perfect life, and that is exactly the problem. Beneath it, Richie is quietly drowning. The weight of impending fatherhood and mounting financial strain has become too heavy to name, so he hides it the way so many men do, behind a mask of lad culture, fuelled by cocaine, whiskey and denial.
This is the world of Sessions, a new British psychological thriller that turns an unflinching eye on ‘sesh’ culture and the damage it does to the people who live inside it, and to everyone who loves them.
When his charismatic best friend Steve (Jonas Armstrong) pulls him into a high-stakes property deal with a corrupt developer (Leo Gregory), Richie sees a final chance to fix his life and prove his worth as a man. What begins as a quick score soon becomes a waking nightmare. As the deal unravels, Richie loses his job, then his marriage, then his grip on reality. Hunted by a creditor (Rupert Graves) and haunted by his own mind, he spirals through a haze of drugs and paranoia, clinging to the one person he believes he can still trust. It is a visceral, uncomfortable watch, and it is meant to be. Beneath the thriller mechanics, Sessions is about the silent epidemic of male mental health: the cost of toxic enabling, the trauma of unspoken grief, and the life-saving importance of men finally asking for help.
For co-writer and star Daniel O’Reilly, none of this is abstract.“I’ve poured everything into a film about a generation gripped by sesh culture,” he says. “A film that holds a mirror to the men who don’t even know they’re battling their demons. That speaks for the women fighting to hold their families together. That shows men what they’re doing to themselves and their families before it’s too late. Before the shame and guilt of messing it all up becomes too much… and they choose to leave this world behind. Like I almost did.”
That honesty runs through the whole production. Behind the camera is director Giles Alderson (Food for Thought, The Dare), who brought his own history to the material. “Sessions is a performance-driven psychological thriller,” Alderson explains. “But beneath the witty, dark dialogue, it is a drama about a man with addictive tendencies who is struggling with machismo and where he fits in society. Addiction is serious. It grabs at you and doesn’t let go. We can all hide behind lad culture or ‘egging each other on,’ but the ramifications are huge. Having lived it and been hurt by it, I know the effects it can have on family members, and I can say in all honesty that some bruises don’t heal.”
Alderson’s partner is a psychodynamic therapist, and he has spent time in therapy himself, which gave him a first-hand understanding of the fear addiction brings. It shaped how he approached the set. “Because of this, I needed my cast and crew to be invested heavily in the work,” he says. “This comes from acting for fifteen years; I understand the vulnerability of baring your soul and the hard work it takes to deliver.”
Sessions doesn’t offer easy answers, but it offers something rarer: a glimmer of hope. By showing what happens when a man stays silent, it makes a quiet case for the opposite: that speaking up, however late and however hard, can change the ending.
Sessions will be available for digital download.
Movie Rating: 4 stars.
Movie Rating Guide
1 Star = Unwatchable
2 Stars = Cannot Recommend
3 Stars = Great for the Fans
4 Stars = A Solid Movie
5 Stars = Must Own (DVD/Stream Download)
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