Review: Pillion

Director:  Harry Lighton

Stars:  Harry Melling, Alexander Skarsgård, Lesley Sharp

While on the festival circuit touring the deliciously sick sci-fi horror Infinity Pool, director Brandon Cronenberg – and sometimes co-star Mia Goth – would parade out onto the stage with the film’s puppy dog lead Alexander Skarsgård leashed on all fours. In the context of the movie, which makes Skarsgård’s character a deliriously exploited dimwit, it acted as a little coup de grâce to an evening. But it also showed Skarsgård’s willingness to exhibit himself as a good-humoured ambassador for shameless kink. Now, with Harry Lighton’s Bromley-based Pillion, he gets to flex himself in the opposing role, playing a dominant biker named Ray who pulls mild-mannered family boy Colin (Harry Melling) inexorably into his orbit.

Skarsgård’s casting here has a similar effect to, say, Scarlett Johansson’s in Under the Skin, in that his Hollywood good looks and physique seem so wildly out of place in the humdrum suburbs of Greater London that he generates an air of mystique simply by being there. Watching him assess a modest Sunday roast is, frankly, fucking bizarre. Unlike Glazer’s brooding, stoic parable, director Lighton is more than willing to play this for its intrinsic humour, and a comfortable amount of mileage is eked from Ray’s chiseled, towering otherness.

The two meet by chance one Christmas Eve, when Colin is partaking in an apparently annual tradition of singing in a barbershop quarter at the local pub, proffering his straw boater to indifferent punters for spare change. Ray doesn’t cough up any shrapnel, but he does make an unexpected overture; an invite to a Christmas Day rendezvous outside the local Primark. Like I said, Pillion is quite happy playing up the comedic dissonance of star and setting.

Said encounter sets the stall for their hyper-specific relationship, a dom/sub dynamic in which the breadth of the rules are never laid out explicitly. Instead we’re with Colin as he adopts the role expected of him, tentatively feeling out the boundaries with enough foppish mannerisms to sate those still pining for a young Hugh Grant. Melling’s Colin is incredibly charming in this mode. Skarsgård’s Ray remains an unreadable cold fish, and the lack of warmth becomes a point of tension and nervousness.

It’s tempting to view the uneasy development of this dynamic as toxic. Colin is clearly inexperienced in the gay scene and his sexual initiations with Ray are typified by awkwardness, pain and difficulty. Yet Melling’s performance expresses another story – frequently in the aftermath of subjugation – and the moments in which Colin can’t help but break a glassy-eyed smirk or beam of satisfaction belay our fears that this is a situation beyond his control or enjoyment. Colin’s well-meaning and terminally ill mother Peggy (Lesley Sharp) initially presents as an understanding, even smotheringly supportive presence. But the tight-lipped nature of Colin and Ray’s relationship becomes a sticking point and her own limits of understanding are revealed.

Through her well-intentioned but limited sympathies we understand more broadly the difficulties that persist for both queer communities and more specialist subsets when facing the vanilla mindsets of the status quo. Pillion is, at times, a bracing education for the uninitiated. Neither Lighton nor his stars Skarsgård and Melling shy away from the more explicit and specific sexual play enjoyed by Ray and his queer biker community. A birthday picnic is quite revealing in this regard. Some Peggies in the audience might get more than they bargained for.

Others will be in hog’s heaven as Lighton gifts us a delightfully kinky and sexed up diversion from the staid state of most British cinema. None of this is played for Carry-On style tittering, but rather – much like David Cronenberg’s approach to sex in Crash – as coolly observed documentation of recreational human behaviour. At its most detached Pillion almost feels like a study.

Fortunately there’s generosity and plenty of humanity, even in spite of the defensive wall of anonymity put up by Ray. The reasons for his need for a subject like Colin are never expanded upon. He’s a closed book til the end. But it’s worth restating that this is Colin’s journey; a roadmap to personal discovery that he can take forward as his life unfolds ahead of him. A place where he doesn’t necessarily need to hang on tightly to the waist of another, but can steer his own path to happiness.