HOLD TIGHT

IN PILLION, TWO MEN EMBARK ON A NO-HOLDS-BARRED BDSM RELATIONSHIP. AND AS WE DISCOVER, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WAS OFF LIMITS…

WORDS CHRISTINA NEWLAND AISTE STANCIKAITE

WE ALL KNOW THE ROMCOM CHECKLIST. The meet-cute. The sweet date-montage. The meet-the-parents scene. So how do you approach making a romcom today without leaning into every cliché in the book?

You could make it about BDSM, for one thing. And you could set it in ancient Rome. Or on a gay cruise. You could put your characters in gladiator garb, a Hawaiian shirt, or make them — say — a part of a biker gang.

That was what British filmmaker Harry Lighton was thinking when he set out to write his first feature, Pillion. He wanted to adapt Adam Mars-Jones’ scabrous, sad, funny 2020 novel Box Hill, about a gay BDSM relationship in the world of bikers. But it was the central sexual and emotional relationship, one of submissive inexperience versus dominant certainty, that Lighton wanted to explore most. “I like to take big swings at the source material and see what sticks,” he explains to Empire. “There was such extremity between the characters, I thought it might be better in Ancient Rome, where that was built into the hierarchy. But eventually we returned to the world of the book, and of bikers.”

His final screenplay settled for something much more workaday, then, updating the novel’s 1970s setting to present day, suburban London. The romcom meet-cute becomes oral sex behind a Primark. (“Did you kiss?” becomes a difficult question to answer for our protagonist.) The sweet date-montage is thrown into the ‘wrong’ part of the movie. And meeting the parents? A disaster.

Pillion stars Harry Melling (best known as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films) as Colin, a shy, openly gay young man living with his close-knit, conventionally British parents, and bored by the men his well-meaning mum tries to set him up with. But when he encounters handsome stranger Ray — Alexander Skarsgård in full biker leathers — playing darts in the local pub, he is immediately hypnotised. The pair begin an enigmatic dominant-submissive relationship which turns romcom stereotypes into disarray. While Ray’s dog sleeps on the sofa, Colin gets on the floor, and does all the housework and cooking, as part of a 24/7 sub-dom dynamic that hinges on the sexual thrill of inferiority. “It was such an interesting, creatively rich thing to see how romcom tropes map onto such an atypical romantic model,” says Lighton. “Queering genre conventions excites me. And by no means is it just about sex. It’s about self-definition and about how taking risks and having uncomfortable experiences can expand your self-definition.”