If you like it rough, Pillion is your picnic
Courtesy of A24
Colin (Harry Melling) is a terminally single, awkward, and self-conscious chud. He lives a quiet life with his parents and writes parking tickets for a living. Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) is the chiseled leader of a leather gay biker gang, confidently aloof, and a nighttime wearer of slutty little glasses. Believe it or not, these two are about to become an item. It’s the classic opposites attract premise, with a kinky and not-so-classic twist. Skarsgård calls it a “dom-com.”
Ray catches Colin at a bar after the latter’s barbershop quartet performance, and the pair later meet in a dark alleyway. One blowjob later—along with a close-up of Ray’s tightly leathered fly—Colin becomes the sub to Ray’s dom. He cooks for Ray, buys his groceries, joins Ray’s gang of queer leather bikers, shaves his head, and starts to wear a lock and chain. Ray wears the key and allows Colin to sleep on his bedroom floor, too.
For Colin, the relationship is more than sexual. Most often, in fact, the only form of intimacy they share is mere proximity.
Their unorthodox relationship makes Ray’s rare kindnesses—from long shots of Colin’s hands to lingering as he rides pillion on the bike, to missionary sex on a birthday camping trip with the gang—addictingly tender. When we’re as subject to this addiction as Colin is, we’re really made to understand his “aptitude for devotion,” despite how little we know about Ray and what Colin truly wants from Ray (or even for himself).
If this were a standard rom-com, Ray might eventually let his guard down and give Colin more equal romantic footing. If this were Kinky Gay Sex: The Movie, it might be more gratuitous, with Colin losing himself entirely to Ray. But Pillion’s biggest strength, with its hard exterior of leather and bikes and bondage, is its reserve and the sensitivity that comes as a result.
One of the pair’s most revealing moments is in the movie’s final act. After asking for—and being refused—a day off from their usual terms, where he and Ray act like the “normal” couple they aren’t, Colin steals Ray’s bike in an act of self-assertion. When he eventually comes back, Ray surprisingly doesn’t punish him but grants him that desired day off.
While its entire course of events is indulgently, dreamily unlikely, Pillion leaves out the theatrics. This disciplined restraint shines in giving us a story that isn’t about meeting desire as much as it is about coming to terms with what desire could look like.
It’s a compelling vision of kink, and the possibilities that emerge between people in its subcultures.
For everything Colin endures in the life of a chud, he’s hardly ever humiliated. For the control he seems to lose as Ray’s sub, he doesn’t lose who he is. Really, it’s the opposite.
