LFF 2025: Pillion

There may be nowhere more devoid of sex appeal than a deserted English high street on Christmas night – all shuttered shopfronts and a few decorations twinkling half-heartedly over the rain-wet pavement – but a young man on his knees is about to find God tonight behind this Primark. How better to mark the day of the lord Jesus Christ than enthusiastic fellatio and licking the dirt off a man’s boot?

Harry Lighton’s debut feature Pillion, named for the passenger backseat of a motorcycle, is about the ride of your life that comes with surrendering control. Based on the Adam Mars-Jones novel Box Hill, it is a sweet, often funny, still-thorny portrait of the dominant-submissive relationship that sparks between Colin, a gentle-natured traffic warden played by Harry Melling, and Ray, a mysterious motorcyclist he meets at the pub.

Ray, a stone-cold god of a man, is a biker who wears all leather, deigns to speak very few words, and taciturnly reads Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle in bed. Alexander Skarsgård is on continuing, excellent form here playing beautiful men with deviant desires; after all, what is the point of being hot if you’re not going to get freaky with it?

Colin’s days consist of being yelled at for giving people parking tickets, and his nights are spent at home with his loving parents or singing in his dad’s barbershop quartet at the pub. It’s here he meets Ray, who wordlessly orders Colin to rendezvous for that first, fateful supplication, and where Colin discovers he likes the taste of submission on his tongue. Like a puppy, his first forays into the rituals of kink are eager yet clumsy, but as he reorients his life around Ray’s beck and call, they both discover that he has “quite the aptitude for devotion”.

Pillion largely plays like a rom-com, giving familiar beats (including the dreaded ‘meet the parents’ scene) a fresh and explicit spin. Its sweetness works in tandem with rather than against its unflinching sexuality. A particularly inspiring rough fuck on a picnic table impressively proves just how much emotional storytelling a well-made sex scene can hold, and thankfully, the film is largely uninterested in moralising about the kind of sex people want to have. Besides a slightly unconvincing final act, what emerges is a small story compellingly told: not so much about Ray and Colin’s D/S arrangement as it is about how we come to negotiate an understanding of ourselves through our relationships with others, the restraints that serve us, and the ones that don’t. 

Stylistically pared-back in a way that lets the dynamic between Melling and Skarsgård shine, an exception is made for the dreamlike, slow-motion sequences of Colin riding pillion: the camera gazing fetishistically on hands gripping leather, the stark floodlights on a night ride making everything else fade away, arms wrapping around waists with the rush of being able to touch what feels like freedom. There will be pain and loss and joy and pleasure; life is about submitting to it all.

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Pillion had its UK premiere at London Film Festival
Released 28 Nov by Picturehouse; certificate 18