Release Date – 28th November 2025, Cert – 18, Run-time – 1 hour 47 minutes, Director – Harry Lighton
Quiet parking officer Colin (Harry Melling) becomes the submissive partner of tough-exterior biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), however while the relationship allows Colin to discover more of himself a lack of communication and expression from his partner causes tensions.
‘The annual gay BDSM bikers’ skinny dipping and fishing expedition’ easily sounds like it could be a Python sketch. Pillion sees no element of humour or mocking in the day out between biking enthusiast friends and their submissive/ dominant partners. While the film is refreshing and original in its normalised, unjudging view of the kinks of the characters, including protagonist Colin’s (Harry Melling) “aptitude for devotion,” this scene is also refreshing for Colin as he is brought further into a world where he’s less alone.
The quiet, unsure parking officer meets near-silent, hard-staring, leather-clad biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) at a pub on Christmas Eve, the next night their first date is a quick, seemingly unintimate blow job in an alley in the town centre. Yet, Colin’s intrigued, and much like him we’re drawn in to the mystery of Ray. However, as the pair move in together and their sub-dom relationship takes place, with Colin starting to find himself and his expressions of love within it, the reasons for Ray’s mystery start to cause tensions between the pair.
Skarsgård is great at turning the uncommunicative biker from a tough-edged enigma to a character clearly holding something in, making it hard for Melling’s continuously tender performance to start conversations about his want for more expression and conversation between the pair, more intimacy. There’s clearly a connection between the two, but it feels, successfully, divided because of their different views, and wants, from the relationship. Caught in the contrast between the brave and compelling performances, both, like the film, unflinching, totally committed and unshakably sensitive.
While many films may try to find humour around Pillion’s basis the laughs that are present, and there are a good few, come from the surroundings. Interactions Colin has with his colleagues and family as his looks start to change – although his mum (Lesley Sharp) starts to grow increasingly concerned the more distanced her son appears to become, especially when he reveals that Ray’s told him to go to the shop to buy ingredients for his special birthday dinner, that he has to cook himself. Even still, the enigmatic sense that hangs around Ray and what draws Colin too him is still understood and in place.
Yet, the humour never gets in the way of the growing strain the pair face due to the lack of dialogue they share. It’s a point that, like many others throughout the film, is looked at thoughtfully, bringing out the emotional side of things in a relationship that often lacks direct, verbal emotional expression – wonderfully conveyed as Melling starts to overflow and leak out his wants and feelings. He may sometimes hold in his emotions and feelings, yet the film manages to get them across with ease to keep us emotionally engaged and connected with Colin and the journey he goes on.
Everything in Pillion comes together not for a film that can be best described as bold or raw, but simply refreshing. An original love story that manages to gently and naturally flip over its themes to show the other, more difficult side of things in the wonderfully-performed central relationship. Mysterious and compelling, this is a tender look at discovery of self in love and communicating in the wake of that, even if they might seem to contrast.
Tender, compassionate and enigmatic, Pillion is a refreshing love story about self-discovery and trying to communicate. Sensitively performed by Melling and Skarsgård, the central relationship is utterly compelling as the film easily communicates the emotions the characters can’t.
Just A Little Bit Random 