There’s no slow fade into Pillion. The film opens with desire already in motion, tentative, charged and slightly off balance. For stars Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling, that immediacy is the point.
Directed by Harry Lighton in his feature debut, Pillion adapts the novel Box Hill and relocates its 1970s setting to the present. The title refers to the passenger seat of a motorbike, a loaded metaphor for a story about control, longing and the risk of letting someone else steer.
A Christmas Eve Encounter
Colin (Melling), a shy member of a barber shop quartet still living with his parents, meets Ray (Skarsgård), a leather-clad biker, at a local bar on Christmas Eve. Colin is technically on a date arranged by his mother. Ray has other plans.
Their first interaction sets the tone. Colin barely speaks. Ray dictates the rhythm. What appears to be a fleeting hookup stretches into something more layered when Ray responds to Colin’s eager messages and invites him into his home. What follows is a dominant-submissive dynamic that Colin navigates through instinct and missteps.
The film keeps the terms deliberately unclear. Is it an arrangement? A romance? Something in between? That ambiguity fuels both men’s expectations and illusions.
Bringing the Kink Community In
To ground the story in lived experience, Lighton cast members of a real gay bikers motorcycle club. According to Melling, their presence changed everything.
“They were incredibly generous,” he said. “You might think asking practical questions about certain scenes would be exposing, but they wanted us to get it right.”
Skarsgård agreed, noting that many of the bikers traveled to screenings and championed the project. Watching them react to the finished film for the first time was emotional, he said, especially given how vulnerable the material is.
Their involvement also reshapes the film’s gaze. Rather than treating BDSM as spectacle, Pillion situates it within community.
Awkwardness as Intimacy
On screen, BDSM often lands in one of two extremes: ominous or glossy. Skarsgård said Lighton was intent on avoiding both.
“When sub-dom dynamics are depicted, it’s either intimidating or overly romanticized,” he said. “Here, it’s explicit at times, but also tender and awkward.”
That awkwardness becomes part of the film’s honesty. Sex is not choreographed into fantasy. Bodies fumble. Positions shift. Experience is earned rather than assumed.
For Melling, that approach underscored Colin’s arc. “It doesn’t always go the way film sex usually goes,” he said. “That felt exciting from an acting perspective.”
Ray, by contrast, speaks little. Skarsgård joked that his character might have only a handful of lines. Yet silence does not equal detachment. The performance leans on physical presence, restraint and subtle shifts in control.
Beyond the Basement Trope
Pillion resists framing kink as something hidden away in a shadowy corner. The camera does not flinch, but it also does not glamorize. Instead, it lingers on negotiation, insecurity and the tension between physical intensity and emotional need.
As Colin begins to question whether devotion alone is enough, the story pivots toward self-awareness. The “pillion” passenger starts to consider whether he wants to remain in the back seat.
In a cultural moment hungry for depictions of male vulnerability, Pillion offers something distinct. It does not sanitize desire, nor does it sensationalize it. The result is a queer romance that understands power as fluid and intimacy as something that can be both messy and meaningful.
For Skarsgård and Melling, that balance is what makes the film resonate. It’s not about shock value. It’s about showing that even within rigid roles, people are still figuring themselves out.
