Queer BDSM romcom Pillion is the Valentine’s Day movie you didn’t know you needed

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Pillion

Directed by Harry Lighton

Written by Harry Lighton, based on the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones

Starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard

Classification N/A; 107 minutes

Opens in select theatres Feb. 13

Critic’s Pick

What happened to the big-screen romcom? Every so often, a new movie comes along to remind audiences of the pure pleasures of the genre, although the theatrical-first hits are scattered far too few and far between: a new Celine Song film here, maybe a sleeper hit like Anybody But You.

For the most part, though, the romcom has been swallowed whole by streaming, and the watered-down expectations of the small screen are evident in all the many diluted affairs clogging your Netflix queues. But this weekend, the romcom gets the big-screen couple it needs, even if it’s not the one many moviegoers expected: Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard.

The two actors play the couple at the heart of writer-director Harry Lighton’s tender, surprising and altogether enrapturing new film Pillion, which takes the tropes of the romcom and pushes them into an unconventional, non-judgmental space that feels like a breath of fresh, leather-scented air.

Melling, best known for his decade-plus turn as the horrid Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, stars as Colin, a lonely parking-ticket inspector in a suburb of London who is looking for love in all the wrong-but-maybe-also-right places. After being set up with a few duds courtesy of his parents – who, in a twist when it comes to queer romances, are fully, unequivocally supportive of their son’s sexuality – Colin encounters the enigmatic biker Ray (Skarsgard) at a local pub.

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On the surface, the men couldn’t make for a more mismatched pair. Colin is meek and mousy, cute in his own way but a four – maybe a Bromley five – compared to the towering Ray, a perfect-10 portrait of motorcycle-riding machismo.

Yet the two fall into their own kind of committed relationship, albeit one operating around the principles of a strict BDSM relationship: Colin is the submissive partner, obeying every one of Ray’s commands. In turn, the dominant Ray fulfills Colin’s most intense desires – until he can’t, and the power dynamics shift.

The evolution of Colin and Ray’s relationship is traced with a steamy kind of sensitivity. Lighton, in his feature directorial debut, never treats the BDSM scene as an object of fetishistic curiosity, but rather a culture rich with yearning, compassion, jealousy – the entire gamut of romantic life.

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There might be a handful of scenes that push the limits of on-screen sex, no matter if it’s heteronormative or queer, but it all works so well because Lighton is clearly disinterested in easy titillation. He’s not interested in what happens when our blood starts pumping, but why.

The filmmaker got tremendously lucky, too, by pairing Melling and Skarsgard. The two bring entirely different sensibilities and energies to the story – this isn’t the first time Skarsgard has sauntered onto the screen with the unbreakable confidence of a dominant bull – but they each approach their characters with intelligence and wit.

By the point that Pillion, whose title references the secondary seat on a motorcycle, reaches the moment in which Colin asks Ray for something that the latter cannot quite accommodate – or at least has never allowed himself to imagine – even the most Netflix-gagged romcom fan will realize that Lighton’s film is exactly the shot in the arm the genre needed. May we all live so happily ever after.