PILLION: Aptitude Test

At a certain point in one’s adolescence, the line between the storybook fantasies of childhood and the baser archetypal fantasies of adulthood can begin to blend into one another. So it is in Pillion, British director Harry Lighton’s debut feature, which drenches the BSDM biker scene it takes as its subject in the wide-eyed dreaminess of its virginal protagonist, Colin (Harry Melling), a lonely gay boy with intensely supportive parents and not much else going on. When we first meet Colin, he’s in the passenger seat, on the way to a pub date with a young man in a holographic “Alexa, Free Britney” t-shirt, watching a biker speed by out his window. The pillion is the backseat of a motorbike, and while Passenger Princess doesn’t quite have the same butch ring to it, that’s essentially Colin’s state affairs. He still lives with his parents and, like Lee Holloway in Secretary (2002), this film’s closest spiritual sibling, he’s largely unformed, just waiting for something to happen to him. When it finally does, in the form of Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the brooding blonde hunk with the vacant pillion to fill from the opening sequence, Colin throws himself at the change, becoming Ray’s submissive without ever asking what that entails–– he may not know what he wants, but he knows whose direction he wants to run in. After barely floundering his way through their first boot-licking sexual encounter, he puts himself out there just enough to get that much across, dirt still on his nose: “Practice makes perfect, and I think I’d like to practice with you.” 

source: Warner Bros. Pictures

This sweet, kinky coming-of-age tale is a straightforward one, arguably to a fault, but for all its repetitions, its monomania also nicely reflects the adolescent mentality of its subject. This is a film about the obsessiveness and eventual self-definitions that come with first sexual awakenings, contrasting the saccharine ultra-banality of Colin’s days as a parking enforcer with cuddly middle-aged parents and the rush of getting whisked away by a man roughly twice his size who never always makes it clear whether he’s talking to Colin or the dog. Melling and Skarsgård are excellent as two people slowly learning how to speak the same language: Lighton squeezes miles of effective cringe comedy out of Colin’s awkward social niceties bouncing off of Ray’s impassiveness, a dynamic perfectly reflected in their cartoonishly disparate physicalities–– just because Skarsgård could play this role in his sleep doesn’t mean he wasn’t perfectly cast for more reasons than one. “He really is impossibly handsome,” another biker’s submissive tells Colin at a bondage-heavy picnic, “you sort of bring his qualities into relief.” He’s right, and Colin, to his chagrin, knows it. There’s elegance to watching this protean character slowly find his footing in a world where everyone else knows the rules already, and Melling’s cautiously vulnerable performance is subtly modulated to bring every small step of that process into relief. Being with Ray is mostly following instructions: cooking Ray’s meals, doing his laundry, changing his dog’s water bowl, sleeping on his floor. Watching Colin slowly discover that, for reasons he (thankfully) doesn’t ever feel the need to unpack, he enjoys it, is a pleasure. Soon, he begins testing Ray in turn, and I personally found myself grinning from ear to ear.  

source: Warner Bros. Pictures

As all of this might suggest, Pillion is, in essence, a classed-up YA rom-com for queer adults (fair warning: those looking for more heavy-duty on-screen kink should, alas, look elsewhere). Its greatest intervention on this score is to transfer the cadences of the coming-out narrative onto a kink tale. In 2026, there are few ways to present a young queer person navigating their parents’ opinions on their sexual and romantic life that don’t ring hollow or hackneyed. Smartly, then, here Colin’s parents set him up on dates with boys and even let him borrow his dad’s appropriately distressed leather jacket for his first date with Ray (“A biker! Sounds like an adventure!” his mom approves from the kitchen). It’s only when the new couple’s obvious power dynamics make themselves apparent that they get queasy, lending freshness to the kinds of conversations that are so essential to developing a sense of sexual self-understanding. As Colin matures, the narrative matures with it, revealing the cracks in a dynamic that was never fully adjudicated by its partners, but never with the type of condemnation or salaciousness that still occasionally plagues films about kink in a post-50-Shades-of-Grey world. You’ll find yourself thoroughly invested. Pillion is a deeply charming, earnest film about the ways young people throw their hearts and bodies into things without knowing any better, sometimes get in over their heads, and usually end up better for it. With practice, Ray teaches Colin that he has an aptitude for devotion, and whether or not he’ll always be the one to receive it, that lesson is a tremendous one. Practice makes perfect.