The Sessions


Generally favorable reviews - based on 39 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 36 out of 39
  2. Negative: 0 out of 39

Where To Watch

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Critic Reviews

  1. Reviewed by: Peter Bradshaw
    Jan 21, 2013
    The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.
  2. Reviewed by: Angie Errigo
    Jan 15, 2013
  3. Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    Oct 18, 2012

Awards & Rankings

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 72 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 25 out of 28
  2. Negative: 1 out of 28
  1. Aug 8, 2013
    The sessions is a sad moving film about a disabled men who wants to lose his virginity. It also has good actors but that's all in that film.The sessions is a sad moving film about a disabled men who wants to lose his virginity. It also has good actors but that's all in that film. It is boring and it really reminded me of porn with a disabled men. It is based on true story but I can't believe that there are people who get paid to have sex with disabled people? I was really disappointed as I expected a masterpiece but The Sessions is not something great in particular and the actress didn't deserve her nomination for an Oscar as she didn't do pretty much anything. She just cried in two scenes. A great disappointment... Full Review »
  2. Jan 7, 2013
    This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view. Mark O'Brien never figured out how to be lovable. Sentenced to live and die in an iron lung after contacting polio as a child, the poet/journalist, weighing sixty pounds when Jessica Yu filmed her documentary short Breathing Lessons, was, as a matter of fact, a grotesquerie. Had this physically compromised man found romantic love with a normal woman in real life, it would have indeed been stranger than fiction. Cheryl Ward, the sex surrogate who worked with Mark, did not retrieve a love poem from the garbage can; did not leave an envelope of money lying on the dashboard
    because she felt like a cheap hooker being compensated for services rendered; did not fall for her client. The Sessions is a lie, bolstering the myth that, in O'Briens own words: "If you become disabled, you can overcome it by working hard." The Sessions doesn't prepare you for the sight of Mark's gaunt, abstract body, a spectacle that would have landed him in the freak shows of yore, not in somebody's boudoir. In order for an audience to believe that Cheryl could develop a romantic bond with Mark, his physique had to fall on the right side of repulsion. If O'Brien's body was accurately depicted, the women in the writer's life would seem like kinky fetishists with a thing for acute disfigurement. An audience, therefore, wouldn't buy the coda, where his female admirers cry at the funeral. As played by John Hawkes, the author of the article "On Seeking a Sex Surrogate" has some sex appeal, some charm, whereas his real-life counterpart was intrinsically bereft of neither. Throughout both films, we hear excerpts from O'Brien's poetry, and in a love poem to an aide, Mark's wish, expressed in the doc, that Amanda would "talk to me as a human instead of her savagely crippled employer" gets fulfilled in the biopic through contrived scenes where the coed integrates Mark into the world of the able-bodied, like when they laze together at a student picnic, making him feel like a man. Full of p*ss and vinegar, he declares his love for Amanda at the boutique, a declaration that goes unreciprocated. O'Brien, in Breathing Lessons, we find out, is harder to love; that Hawkes is playing an idealized version of the man in the iron lung. His counterpart was not fearless, was not a saint. On the subject of love, in regard to his poem about Amanda, he says, "I would kill this poem and tell her how much I love her." John Merrick wouldn't make such pronouncements in real life, and neither did Mark. The filmmaker ennobles him with an unbeknowing bravery. Breathing Lessons shows O'Brien as he really was, warts and all. The poet had hired a sex surrogate because he was angry at all women for not loving him. Mark wanted control, the same locus of power he held over his professional-minded caretakers. Sexual intercourse would be his revenge. Mark could have fired Cheryl, hurting the quasi-prostitute before she hurt him, like so many women before her. But in The Sessions, an audience will be hard-pressed to detect a misogynistic bone in Mark's body, going so far as asking permission from a priest before Cheryl guides him through the nuts and bolts of physical love. When Amanda reappears in the film, taking over the reins of Mark's gurney from Vera, her successor, en route to a public park, he tells his first love, "It could have been you, but it wasn't," causing the girl to weep, as if she regretted the choice to pass on Mark's overture. In this sense, the filmmaker takes the "opposites attract" trope popular in love stories to the edge. After all, for most, if not all women, an iron lung would be an absolute deal breaker when choosing a suitor. Mark is outfitted with the power of manipulation; he knows his words can maim, and yet, he disingenuously bemoans to Vera that Amanda "didn't show the slightest bit of jealousy." The sex makes him smarmy. To break a woman's heart, it's what Mark O'Brien probably dreamt of the most, second only to achieving full penetration. He gets The Diving Bell and the Butterfly treatment; he's patterned after Jean Dominique Bauby, the one-time editor of Elle magazine, since Bauby too is still desired, even though he's paralyzed from head-to-toe. In a game of intertextual one-upmanship, O'Brien wins. Whereas Mark was able to reach a state of tumescence, Bauby could no longer do so after his stroke. Interminably flaccid, Bauby goes through the motions of the playboy's former lothario-self, leering at the ladies and their respective erogenous zones from his one good eye. The p*nis, no longer a weapon, Bauby now employs letters, one eyeblink at a time, to form words, annihilating his wife, when he forces her to translate an intimate message to his mistress. When Cheryl informs her client about all the men who "would give anything to have a natural erection," she could be talking about Bauby, who like Mark, due to unforeseen circumstances, satiates himself by writing his brains out.
    Full Review »
  3. Dec 20, 2012
    If you are avoiding this movie because it's about a man in an iron lung and a sex therapist, don't. It has everything--humor, intelligence,If you are avoiding this movie because it's about a man in an iron lung and a sex therapist, don't. It has everything--humor, intelligence, and universality. The writing has not one false note. And if I ever see a performance as superb as Helen Hunt's, it will probably be given by Helen Hunt. Full Review »