Dick-sucking, boot-licking, and ball-gagging are de rigueur for a movie like Harry Lighton’s wildly graphic and strangely moving BDSM romance, “Pillion.” But for a British queer film that puts the particulars of a gay dominant-submissive affair (or arrangement, better yet) up front and up close, actors Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling find the sweet center of a story marked by clamps, cages, and assless unitards. No doubt comparisons will arise to another A24 movie, “Babygirl,” which last year put Nicole Kidman on all fours, crying out to Harris Dickinson that “I’m gonna pee!” which actually she was just having an orgasm with another person for the first time.
Lighton and co-writer Adam Mars-Jones really do take us there in the delightful “Pillion,” with Skarsgård getting more emotionally naked than ever and almost as physically more than he ever got as Eric Northman on TV’s “True Blood.” But not without, at first, this leather-clad biker, who seeks a submissive with seemingly disinterested vibes, radiating aloof energy when he first meets barbershop quartet singer Colin (Harry Melling, in a truly special and wonderful breakout performance). A parking garage attendant by day and dandied-up singer by night who’s just a bit too old to still be living with his parents — though his mum (Lesley Sharp) is dying of cancer, which in part keeps him home — Colin isn’t so much looking for love or companionship or sex as much as he finally happens to fall into it when he’s asked for a date of sorts on Christmas Eve by Ray (Skarsgård, who looks and sounds more and more like his father with each day).
Ray is an enigma and a mystery, a man who zips into town on a motorbike like a phantom, and could just as easily evaporate at any minute. He’s not at all giving of emotion toward Colin as their courtship — again, if we can call it that — turns into a serious but never sinister game of domination and submission. When Ray eventually brings Colin back to his ascetically composed apartment, he refuses to let Colin hang up his coat. He refuses Colin to have much volition at all. Ray also has a tattoo in the middle of his chest, inked with the names “Ellen Wendy Rosie” for reasons never explained but all the more to add to his impenetrable allure.
It’s penetrating Colin — physically, psychically — that he eventually gets around to after some toying and coying. He won’t let Colin sleep next to him, keeping him on the floor like a dog at the foot of the bed. Here’s the kind of guy for whom Karl Ove Knausgård ‘s “My Struggle” is light bedtime reading. Colin’s mother is shocked when Ray makes him buy the groceries and cook his own birthday dinner. “You couldn’t upset me if you tried,” Ray, ever the implacable and gorgeous dominator, tells Colin at one point. What makes “Pillion” so thrustingly good is how much the movie teases and tantalizes us, getting off on withholding, until finally unleashing in all its graphicness once Colin is face down, plunging his mouth on Ray’s quite large, pierced cock, plunging ever deeper into Ray’s expansive kinky social world. Scissor Sisters lead Jake Shears makes his acting entrance as one of the submissives orbiting Ray — and he ends up one of the stars of a very hot group sex scene splayed out over a picnic table, in which Ray fucks Colin face to face, eyes locked on eyes, for the first time.
It warms the cockles of my heart still to think about Colin, having shaved his head and totally turned himself over to acts of devotion and in service of his master, wearing a locked chain around his neck, with Ray wearing the key around his own. “Next to you, I’m nothing. When I’m yours, I’m the same,” Colin tells Ray, which sounds like the debased line of someone being desperately exploited by a partner. But Colin says it with the cadence of love, which his mother in her dying days simply cannot understand. Colin willingly puts himself in an abject position because what’s happening between him and Ray is love, for him at least, even if that version of love doesn’t comfortably conform to our understanding of what love is supposed to be, a system of back-and-forth flow in mutual directions. Colin craves Ray’s command, and Ray would be lying if he said he wasn’t feeling feelings about his boytoy, too.
Which is when “Pillion” takes an unexpected direction, Colin finally assuming more control over the relationship and becoming the emotional power bottom he was destined to be in their dynamic. What makes “Pillion” work so well is that the film finally does give way to a big emotional release after so much cockteasing and edging of the audience and of Colin. Cinematographer Nick Morris has an eye for both sweaty intimacy in its hottest moments and the pooling reserves of desire and reined-in emotion that require a certain detachment. Until we are snapped back into what is ultimately a deeply moving love story, one where we become the submissives to Lighton’s strange, beautiful, and sexy vision. It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.
Grade: A-
“Pillion” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A24 will release the film at a later date.
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