Pillion review: Much more than a sexually graphic film
Since finding fame as Dudley Dursley in Harry Potter, Harry Melling has been choosing really interesting and unexpected roles. And they don’t get any more unexpected than the excellent Pillion.
In this British comedy-drama, he plays a timid gay man named Colin, who lives with his parents, issues parking tickets for a living and performs in a barbershop quartet with his dad. You get the impression that there isn’t much going on in his love life. So imagine his surprise when sexy biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgard) invites him to meet. Colin thinks it’s a date, but it’s actually a sexual encounter that tests his compatibility for a dom-sub relationship.
Colin is the very definition of a wet blanket. He is passive and introverted, and he’s so British that some of his lines gave me secondhand embarrassment. Ray is cool, hot and mysterious. It’s such a mismatched pairing. But it works for Ray’s purposes – he wants someone to obey his every command and cook, clean, go shopping, sleep on the floor, and do whatever he wants sexually whenever he’s in the mood. Colin is so enamoured by Ray that he goes along with it.
A lot of noise has been made about the sexually graphic nature of the film, but I found the most interesting and compelling aspect to be Colin’s arc. Through their arrangement, he gains agency, discovers his boundaries and realises that he needs his dom-sub relationship to have some love and intimacy. He starts to speak up, test Ray and push his buttons, trying to relax some of the rules of the strict, loveless relationship. Colin grows so much as a person, when the relationship could have easily made him a more timid or submissive person. Thanks to Melling’s subtle work, you really invest in Colin, whereas Skarsgard (who is perfect as Ray) remains sexy but enigmatic, because Ray keeps everyone at a distance. You catch glimpses of the real Ray sometimes though.
All I knew going into the film was the stars, that it involved a gay biker club and graphic sex scenes. Perhaps it’s been edited since Cannes, but the majority of the sex scenes (there are only three) aren’t that hardcore as the camera focuses on Melling’s face and it’s all in his expression and the sound design. However, there is one sequence in the middle that is very full frontal and graphic – so brace yourself for that one. Perhaps some of the more explicit shots are for shock value, but those scenes in general are integral to the story.
Pillion may sound like an erotic thriller, but it’s a comedy-drama with so much more going for it than the sex scenes. It is much funnier than I expected (shout-out to Lesley Sharp as Colin’s mum for getting the best laugh) and I really cared about Colin. Bravo to writer-director Harry Lighton for balancing the sex, comedy and drama so wonderfully in his directorial debut.
In cinemas from Friday 28th November