Pillion

PILLION   ***

Harry Lighton

2025

IDEA:  A shy, diffident man from the suburbs of London enters into a dom/sub relationship with a confident biker that tests his limits.

BLURB:  At its essence, Pillion is an archetypal story of two opposites — one meek and impressionable and the other brash and obdurate — who change by awakening something in the other. This version of the story just happens to be told with more leather and assless pants than usual. That the film takes place within a gay BDSM subculture is a novelty that writer-director Harry Lighton also makes disarmingly mundane; he’s not interested in taboo-breaking eroticism but in the power imbalances that can affect any relationship, especially one based on dominance and submission. Risking generalization (or worse, misinterpretation), Lighton uses the BDSM milieu to study how partners might negotiate control, desire, and boundaries within an ostensibly consensual relationship. “Ostensibly” because the ways in which Ray treats Colin frequently cross over into abuse. The grace and empathy of Pillion are such that neither character is judged for their respective behavior in this ethically slippery scenario, nor are they psychoanalyzed in some facile effort to rationalize their choices. Lighton puts enormous, gratifying trust in Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård to carry the ambiguities of a relationship in which hurt and pleasure, control and surrender, are separated by a hair (trigger). As the tone oscillates, so does the image and sound, moving between orgiastic countryside idylls, dreamy slow-motion bike rides, and arguments fought through mirrors to the stuttering tune of Satie. Through its kinks, the film finally emerges as a classic Bildungsroman, in which Colin’s sexual, emotional, and moral education reveals how difficult — but also rewarding — it can be to discover yourself.