Pillion: A Love Story in the Background

When pillion, a term used to describe the rear seat of a motorcycle, lends its name to a romantic drama, the film directed by Harry Lighton makes its intentions clear without unnecessary flourish. Starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård, this British feature offers a compelling exploration of identity, submission, and love.

Based on Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, the film follows Colin (Melling), a shy and directionless man whose monotonous life is disrupted when he meets Ray, a sadomasochistic biker. As their relationship develops and the subculture of a gay motorcycle club is gradually revealed, sensitive aspects of late modernity frame BDSM as a practice that, in certain contexts, calls for clinical listening rather than romanticisation.

Melling and Skarsgård deliver performances that are restrained and melancholic, operating as opposing forces within the same mechanism. Together, they construct an unsettling reflection on relationships that disguise abuse beneath the language of desire. The eroticism that punctuates the film carries more warning than seduction.

From a psychological standpoint, fetishes are widely recognised as legitimate components of human sexuality. Research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, for instance, suggests that approximately 40% of adults in Western countries have expressed interest in, curiosity about, or experience with practices associated with BDSM.

What Pillion appears to interrogate, therefore, is not the practice itself, but the emotional terrain in which it takes root. It is within this sensitivity that the director opts for a quiet indictment, free from didacticism, when approaching such a delicate subject. The film becomes an act of visibility around a profoundly complex issue.

As the relationship between Colin and Ray grows increasingly intense, one performance emerges as a point of emotional refuge in a narrative where the waves repeatedly strike at mental health: Lesley Sharp. Playing Colin’s mother, dismissed by Ray as backward-minded, she reminds the audience that love can exist beyond submission.

The result is a romance that seems intent on being remembered as an artistic study of the absence of self-love, a wound that remains painfully inflamed within the LGBTQ+ community. Visually striking, the film tells a story permeated by sadness, suffering, and anxiety.