Pillion (2025)

Primark, rimming, and why Pillion could've been shown at a porn film festival.

A sexy, uplifting, but complicated Christmas-set, rom-com about a shy, stifled young man finding his voice through his first dom-sub relationship with a mysterious, ‘out-of-his-league’ biker - with sex scenes never seen before in mainstream cinema.

Simultaneously banal, touching, and naughty, Pillion is the equivalent of wandering around Trinity shopping centre on your first date, getting finger blasted in an accessible toilet, then gazing into each other’s eyes over a Spoons’ cocktail pitcher.

Harry Lighton’s debut feature film is an incredibly British rom-com with an edge - a film about sexual exploration as a tool to free oneself from suffocating self-doubt and outside control. It’s a film to put a smile on your face and a wetness between your legs.

Pillion opens in a quiet Greater London pub at Christmastime. Christmas might be the least sexy celebration in the Christian calendar - at least Easter has a ripped, naked man nailed to a cross - and the warmth from twinkling fairy lights and tinsel radiates from the screen while the smooth voices of a barbershop quartet begin. Again, not very sexy.

Colin (Harry Melling), our protagonist, is one of these singers, endearingly goofy-looking in a striped suit and matching straw hat. Melling’s face is both gaunt and boyish, like something is straining deep within, and he lets out the last beautiful, high-pitched note. In Pillion, Colin is a castrato searching for his lost balls.

Eventually, at the bar, Colin meets the stern figure in the corner of the pub, the only punter ignoring the festivities. Strikingly handsome, almost looming over Colin, Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) writes his instructions for their first meeting in a Christmas card, and Colin’s fate is sealed. Colin and Ray’s first date isn’t chatting over a coffee, strolling through the park, or cocktails at a bar; it’s a blowjob behind a Primark. Subsequently, Colin becomes not only involved with Ray, but with a whole new world of kinkiness, a brotherhood of gay bikers chatting, drinking pints, and fucking each other.

Broody and monosyllabic, Skarsgård’s Ray would be the manosphere’s sigma dream (if it weren’t for the gay sex). Ray does own a bedframe, but he’s definitely the type of guy who wouldn’t. His house has no decor, and he doesn’t eat chocolate. We can only hope we don’t see him in any Patrick Bateman/Thomas Shelby TikTok edits. A ‘switch’ of an actor, for the red carpet of his last film, Infinity Pool, Skarsgård wore a collar and leash. This time, he holds the reins.

As charming as Pillion is, Lighton doesn’t shy away from the complications of sadomasochistic relationships. Like his previous short film, Wren Boys, which deals with homophobia in Ireland and prison violence, Pillion is a film about masculinity in crisis. Two men representing extremes of sexuality and transgression from traditional masculine ideals. Colin and Ray are shown playfighting; we see them wrestling multiple times before anything obviously kinky. Colin’s skinny body obviously isn’t a match for gym-obsessed Ray, who lives like those unbelievable ‘grindset’ day-in-the-life videos. It’s boy versus man, beta versus alpha. But, for Colin, is it better to be beautiful or to own beautiful things? Ideas of ownership play out in Pillion in unsettling ways. Although Ray ‘owns’ Colin, keeping the key to the lock around his neck, Colin’s desperation to keep Ray despite his treatment of him, his showing off of his Adonis, sees Ray treated as an accessory.

Based on the novel ‘Box Hill’ by Adam Mars-Jones, Lighton’s adaptation differs completely in tone, offering something that could be seen as more palatable, but it still offers a not always jolly interrogation of BDSM dynamics. Often, the most difficult relationships can be the most transformative, which is not to say that we must experience toxic relationships, but that there can almost always be hope to be found.

This combination of well-observed dynamics, no-holds-barred sex scenes, and inclusion of real, gay biker gang members (members of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club) as both actors and advisors comes together for a film that wouldn’t be out of place at a porn film festival. Having just attended the 20th edition of Porn Film Festival Berlin (write-up coming), I was smitten with its welcoming and participatory atmosphere. Pride abounded as queer people and sex workers celebrated their work and their resilience against governments and institutions. With its clear intention to show BDSM as neither an essentially positive nor negative act, not pathologising its protagonists and allowing audiences to figure things out for themselves, Pillion shows a side to kink that we rarely get to see.

In an interview with Variety, Lighton revealed he cut several scenes for the film’s Cannes premiere, including “one close-up of a dick, a hard dick (...) like down the barrel of the lens” to not “push the audience into feeling they were being deliberately shocked by an image.” Maybe this was for the sake of the film being taken seriously by increasingly puritanical pearl-clutching audiences? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: genitalia shouldn’t be shocking.

So, if we've already lost some big-screen cock, my US friends might be disappointed that A24 will probably "de-shine" the semen dripping from Colin's mouth, or worse, cut out the other relatively graphic sex scenes (I am deeply sorry). But even if you (maybe) can’t watch someone getting their ass eaten on a huge, fuck-off multiplex screen, you can warm your cockles like a glass of brandy next to the Christmas tree and immerse yourself in an uplifting rom-com that doesn’t shy away from the intricate nature of sexual power dynamics.

Grab your poppers and open your mind (and holes) to your new favourite Christmas film.