{"id":56753,"date":"2025-10-02T18:21:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T18:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/56753\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T18:21:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T18:21:05","slug":"pillion-is-a-prince-albert-piercing-through-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/56753\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Pillion’ is a Prince Albert Piercing Through the Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tender as the gentle brush of a flogger down the backside, writer-director Harry Lighton\u2019s Pillion<\/a> is the sweetest, hottest master-servant romance we\u2019re been served in decades\u2014since Maggie Gyllenhaal crawled on all fours for James Spader in Secretary, at least. Starring the singular Harry Melling (best known for playing that little shit Dudley in the Harry Potter movies) as a lost soul who finds himself by begging for scraps from the foot of Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a>\u2019s bed (and yeah, relatable), Lighton has with his feature-film debut gifted us with one of the most unexpected love stories of our age. A willing submission of self as satisfying as a single well-earned \u201cGood boy.\u201d We really are just dogs in the end.<\/p>\n

An adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones\u2019s 2019 novel Box Hill, we first meet Colin (Melling) in full candy-stripe regalia singing with his Barbershop Quartet at the local pub. Also featuring his father Pete (Douglas Hodge), Colin is very clearly the stand-out voice in the group, getting all the big solos. But his soulful singing aside it also, from our point of view anyway, seems like a bit of an embarrassing spectacle. With his frilly curls, tra-la-la-ing old-timey ditties to a cramped room full of bikers and drunks who\u2019re only half paying attention, this is probably the first sign Colin might just have himself a humiliation kink. But oh ho ho it won\u2019t be our last.<\/p>\n

Turns out that Colin\u2019s on an informal blind date this night that his enthusiastic mom Peggy (Lesley Sharp) has set up for him\u2014it\u2019s quite lovely, his parents\u2019 unwavering embrace of Colin\u2019s queerness, not once presented as an issue. But just because they don\u2019t mind that he likes boys doesn\u2019t mean they understand what Colin wants or needs from a relationship. And so while the bloke Mom\u2019s brought along seems perfectly nice, it\u2019s clear from his sparkly \u201cFree Britney\u201d t-shirt down to their total lack of chemistry that these two won\u2019t be making any long-term plans. <\/p>\n

Thankfully, there\u2019s some romantic promise squirreled away in the far corner of the pub\u2014one of those bikers that\u2019s not paying attention to Colin\u2019s show is a large golden god of a man named Ray (Skarsg\u00e5rd, giving the best performance of his career to date), who naturally catches Colin\u2019s eye. He is, after all, played by the real-life large golden god Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd. <\/p>\n

What shocks Colin\u2014and us, and eventually all of Colin\u2019s friends and parents and strangers on the street\u2014is that Ray does indeed actually see Colin back. Sauntering up and demanding Colin order him a beer (which Colin does dutifully) Ray takes the beer and passes him a Christmas card with a single command scribbled inside\u2014a place and a time to meet the next day. <\/p>\n

Nevermind the next day is Christmas. And so as his family opens their gifts and hums their carols and tongues their figgy puddings around him, Colin sits in a daze, watching the clock. And the second it\u2019s time to head out he\u2019s out the door despite his mother\u2019s protestations, borrowing his dad\u2019s dated and three-sizes-too-big leather jacket for good measure. They just have him bring the dog in case he needs protection. <\/p>\n

Turns out that Ray\u2019s brought his own dog to their meet-up too, but I\u2019ll leave the sight-gag of those two pups for y\u2019all to discover. What follows from there is perhaps the most aggressively gay antithesis of a meet-cute that\u2019s ever been put on-screen\u2014Pillion doesn\u2019t blush in the slightest in laying bare the very particular facets of a sub-culture within a sub-culture. Which is to say the sexual forthrightness of this encounter might have some normies running for the aisles. <\/p>\n

The film is so ho-hum toward the carnal whirlwind Colin finds himself excitedly, enthusiastically getting pulled into that it makes it all seem like the most natural thing in the world. The Earth itself would and should vibrate from the sound of humanity\u2019s collective falling to its knees to worship the sight of Alexander Skarsg\u00e5rd standing in front of us in a leather jumper and rubbing his crotch\u2014there\u2019s nothing unnatural happening here. And this movie knows it. Merry Christmas to one and all. (Fuck Die Hard\u2014I know what movie I\u2019ll be jingling my bells with every holiday season from here on out.)<\/p>\n

And the ecstatic spark that lights Melling\u2019s face up as this sequence unfurls from under its zipper is really a wonder to behold\u2014Colin has found his place, on his knees in a back alley, and my god it\u2019s beautiful. So much so that Ray, seemingly in it for just the orgasm, also notices\u2014in what\u2019s often a monosyllabic performance Skarsg\u00e5rd is tremendous at showing us how much Colin\u2019s freshly unleashed enthusiasm is constantly tickling Ray under his exterior cool. So what might\u2019ve been a one-time thing turns into a repeat performance, and before you know it Colin\u2019s wearing a padlock around his neck and Ray\u2019s wearing the key. (As an aside it\u2019s pretty funny that this is the second film after 2023\u2019s Please Baby Please that\u2019s found Melling finding himself thanks to a pretty boy in leather. Talk about a very specific niche to claim!)<\/p>\n

From here out Pillion becomes a tangled tango of two-person vulnerabilities, with each of these men elbowing forward their desires and needs\u2014Ray tugging on Colin\u2019s leash and vice versa. Feelings get knotted up like ropes wrapped tight around exposed bottoms bent over public park picnic tables. And never not once does it feel as if the filmmakers or the actors are pulling their punches. Colin\u2019s contradictory quest to eke selfhood from submission isn\u2019t an easy one, and Pillion never shies away from that. (His parents\u2019 confoundedness, where once they were so open-minded, only enriches these complications having their own complications.)<\/p>\n

But Pillion never punishes Colin for his desires either. Well no more than he\u2019d willingly beg for, anyway. The film and its leads are so clear-eyed toward their kinked-up subject that we giddily ride side-saddle through their thorny issues of consent, with massive smiles slapped on our faces and branded on our behinds. \u201cRiding pillion\u201d is the British term for being in the side-car of a motor-bike after all, while further from there it\u2019s turned into queer British slang for being a bottom. So you could say that Pillion makes ecstatic bottoms of us all.<\/p>\n

Pillion screens October 4th and October 5th at the New York Film Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tender as the gentle brush of a flogger down the backside, writer-director Harry Lighton\u2019s Pillion is the sweetest,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[47604,156,47603,409,111,139,69,47605,1066,47600,47601,437,47602],"class_list":["post-56753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-at-least-starring","tag-entertainment","tag-hottest-master-servant-romance-were-been-served-in-decades-since-maggie-gyllenhaal-crawled-on-all-fours-for-james-spader-in-secretary","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pajiba","tag-pop-culture","tag-review-pillion-is-a-prince-albert-piercing-through-the-heart","tag-tender-as-the-gentle-brush-of-a-flogger-down-the-backside","tag-tv","tag-writer-director-harry-lightons-pillion-is-the-sweetest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}