Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Colin (Harry Melling), a shy young man longing for connection, is drawn into an intense and highly controlled BDSM relationship with Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a charismatic biker who dominates every aspect of his life. As Colin sheds pieces of himself to fit Ray’s world, moments of intimacy awaken his desire for mutual care — a need Ray refuses to meet.

Directed by Harry Lighton in his feature debut, Pillion extends the growing legacy of queer cinema with a story that is bound to push some buttons and probe the limits of what general audiences might be willing to subject themselves to with its graphic and provocative nature. And that’s because on top of constructing a narrative focused on a non-traditional relationship—which shouldn’t really raise an eyebrow in this day and age; though it still might catch some less progressive viewers unawares—it opts to push the envelope quite a bit further and introduce its audiences to more exotic, and perhaps extreme, relationship modalities found on the queer spectrum.

Therefore, Pillion ought to come with a bit of a health warning, because going by its genre designation as a romantic comedy-drama found on iMDb and Wikipedia is at the very least misleading and perhaps openly mischievous. This isn’t mild prestige fare akin to Brokeback Mountain, Call Me by Your Name or Moonlight, or even more provocative recent works like Francis Lee’s ‘God’s Own Country. This film happens to be quite a bit more challenging than most, though it still—by filmmaker’s own admission—pulls back from gunning straight after bare shock value. Verging on the pornographic, this movie will expose you to things you might not necessarily be prepared to process and you might see some viewers storm out in protest, too. After all, despite directorial assurances of restraint, Pillion is still a handful with its graphic depictions of sexual activities of the BDSM bent.

But this isn’t necessarily a problem. In fact, these moviegoers who seem unable or unwilling to expose themselves to prolonged scenes of rough gay sex of the anal and oral variety (with lube, strategically accessible wrestling singlets, and other paraphernalia) will deprive themselves of witnessing what can only be described as a thoroughly mediocre story of love and identity. Despite its best intentions, Pillion is an unremarkably unidimensional piece of storytelling that seems almost completely preoccupied with exploring the sexual element of a relationship between two men in an asymmetrical dynamic where one partner completely dominates the other in all aspects. Consequently, it is as though the lives of people this film follows—a handsome and stoic biker Ray and a timid little Colin who works as a parking attendant while he’s not singing in a barbershop quartet—revolved about nothing else and their lives were wholly consumed by sex and sex-adjacent activities, like orgies in the forest or dispensing handjobs at Cineworld.

Visually subversive and culturally provocative as it may seem, Lighton’s movie just doesn’t have much else to discuss and wants us all to engage in the exploits of characters who don’t really do much in their lives. They bike around town and have loads of rough sex. Everything else—between breaking societal taboos, inflicting familial friction, combating loneliness and seeking human connection in a seemingly consensually domineering relationship dynamic—is telegraphed using broad clichés as weapons of choice. Therefore, as much as the occasional element of levity or the innate electricity emanating from Alexander Skarsgård’s performance can temporarily relieve you from the haze of boredom ever so slowly descending upon your senses, it is not enough to render the entire experience worthwhile.

To challenge filmmaker’s protestations, Pillion does very little to convince the viewer that it carries a depth of character beneath its shock value, allegedly tempered to dissuade heterosexual viewers from running away in fear. If anything, underneath the thin layer of latex and leather and characteristically indie flat camerawork with blown out backgrounds, this is still nothing but a shabby love story extended and protracted to fill the running time of a feature effort. Sadly, this movie comes nowhere near the emotional maturity of something like All of Us Strangers, Gregg Araki’s heightened exaltation or Céline Sciamma’s command of the form.

For what it’s worth, Pillion would have likely worked much better as a twenty-minute short. In fact, it plays as though it had been conceptualized as one and then artificially blown up to feature length with very little thought going to filling these empty places in the narrative with character resonance or depth of emotional exploration. It is nothing but a telegraphed story of a guy who doesn’t know who he is and then he finds out that he likes it rough, so he puts it in his Grindr profile. It never solicits sufficient investment from the viewer to rival Luca Guadagnino or Barry Jenkins; It is a purely performative exploit that will leave you mildly shocked, but stone cold nonetheless, and perhaps it would have been a bit more fitting if—in an act of self-aware jest—it was titled Fifty Shades of Gay instead.