‘Pillion’ Review: Alexander Skarsgård Puts the Dom in Domesticity [A-]
Hands grip, thighs clench, leather tightens.
Colin (Harry Melling of The Queen’s Gambit and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) is a parking cop by day and in a barbershop quartet with his father (The Great‘s Douglas Hodge) in pubs by night. Timid, teeth like jagged little pills, one night while he’s on an unsuccessful date he sees biker Ray (an unspeakably sexy Alexander Skarsgård). He doesn’t know it yet but he’s looking for a guy in dominance, 6’5″, blue eyes. Skarsgård’s lanky hotness, a physically intimidating trait on its own, grabs Colin’s attention and Ray notices as he slips him a note to meet up the next night, on Christmas no less, for what amounts to be a test in an alley. Ray is a dom looking for a new sub and Colin is just happy to be there, even if his head-giving skills could use some work. Lighton isn’t out to overly explain or lay on thick exposition of the dynamics of what a gay dom/sub relationship consists of and essentially we’re in Colin’s shoes here in that regard, and we’re all licking Skarsgård’s boots.
As Colin begins to sleep over at Ray’s, first rolled up on the floor, there is a domesticity settling into place and while the dom/sub roles do mirror the heteronormative traditions of husband/wife roles, the creation of this gay subculture was to fuck with it, and it does. To live inner lives on the outside, without secrets and certainly without shame. A camping trip that consists of fishing as much as it does fisting strikes a chord of normalcy that is both bracing and idyllic. Melling, so good in supporting roles, is front and center here in one of the year’s best performances as Colin.
One of the funniest films of the year, yet never in the name of kinkshaming, upon returning home after that night of giving Christmas head, Colin’s father (unknowingly) remarks, “Told you the cold night would turn your throat inside out.” By the time “I Think We’re Alone Now”plays while Colin and Ray wrestle in assless singlets it’s clear that Lighton wants the audience to have fun with his mischievous touches as we chart Colin’s self-discovery in ways unexpected, romantic and aspirational.
Grade: A-
A24 will release Pillion this weekend in select theaters and wider in the coming weeks.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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