Pillion (2025 | United Kingdom, Ireland | 107 minutes | Harry Lighton)
Who could have possibly guessed that the squirmiest elements of watching a meek all-grown-up Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) inadvertently stumble his way into a submissive arrangement with a godlike motorcycle dom played by Alexander Skarsgård would be the amount of holiday barbershop quartet singing?
Like Babygirl before it, this sweet-natured BDSM coming-of-age story is canonically a Christmas movie, even though A24 waited until the Valentine’s season to put it in theaters. It’s on the precipice of the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus that we meet Melling as Colin, behind a curly mop of hair and costumed in traditional pinstripes, harmonizing in a cozy Bromley pub with his quartet of similarly sheltered friends. When Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) walks into the pub with his biker gang, senses a certain shared frequency while ordering chips, and passes him a note to proposition a rendezvous, Colin’s life will never be the same.
Very few rom-coms involve a meet-cute of an after-dinner dog walk interrupted for a back alley blowjob. But with Skarsgård’s Ray styled alternately like a superhero biker in the streets and a hot daddy who reads Karl Ove Knausgård by night, the speed with which Colin fully catapults himself into his service makes perfect sense. (After all, he’s coming from a life of issuing parking tickets by day and sleeping in his parents’ spare room by night.) In a rush of lustful submission, he parts with the long hair, gets a new wardrobe, a lock around his neck, and falls completely under Ray’s spell and onto the titular passenger spot on his bike.
Melling’s transformation from awkward to confident submissive under the withholding tutelage of Skarsgård’s leather bootheels makes for a potent and unlikely journey. The actors have incredible chemistry and commit fully to their erotic experimentation and emotional excavations. Skarsgård does a lot in a limited emotional range, but it’s in Melling’s portrait of an anxious introvert coming alive that the film shines. Lighton directs their pairings in a way that is transgressive in its depictions yet also warmly embracing of the spectrum of people who participate in the kink lifestyle. A lot of it may be shocking, but it’s often also hot enough that a naive audience will understand what Colin sees in it. Sure, there’s extremely explicit stuff like a triumphantly unforgettable summer camping smorgasbord unlike most who haven’t frequented Dan Savage’s HUMP! roadshow will have ever experienced in a public theater. But every potentially shocking scene is in service of a corresponding character development. And most importantly: it is both romantic (in its own way) and funny.
Still, for all of its frank depictions of kink lifestyles, I’m not sure that Lighton’s gentle-hearted film is especially transgressive in its investigation of unconventional sexual dynamics. While the film is never squeamish about the nature of their sexual relationship, it does express some shock on behalf of the audience in terms of the pace of Colin’s rapid transformation and the degree of his devotion. Taken together, this juxtaposition combines into a surprisingly warm and fuzzy portrait of dominance and submission. The small miracle, though, is how it fashions itself into a parable on the importance of discovering the boundaries that exist in fully honoring one’s own “aptitude for devotion” on terms that don’t require losing sense of yourself.
An earlier version of this review ran when Pillion had its US Premiere at Telluride 2025’s 52nd SHOW. It enters wide theatrical release this weekend.
Image courtesy A24.