Writer-director Harry Lighton’s provocative first feature, Pillion is equal parts sweet and acidic in its depiction of an unconventional sexual awakening. Young Colin (Harry Melling) is a nice suburban boy who works as a traffic warden and still lives in outer London with his parents, attempting to find companionship through a series of awkward dating-app encounters. This all changes in an instant when he meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), an enigmatic and impossibly handsome biker who recognises Colin's unspoken need and engages him in a complex Dom/sub relationship. As he realises the older man may not be what he really needs, Colin struggles to reconcile his desires against a possible future with someone who refuses to be known.

Lighton has adapted the 1970s setting of Adam Mars-Jones' searing novella Box Hill and sanded off some of the more disturbing edges in the process, but Pillion remains an intriguingly non-judgemental exploration of power and agency in queer BDSM spaces. The text's original subtitle, “A Story of Low Self-esteem”, takes on a different meaning in the more accepting present day- Colin's parents are fully accepting of their son being gay but balk at the non-traditional relationship, while others wonder aloud how the painfully shy wallflower landed this Adonis. Melling plays the young man with heartbreaking naiveté and gratitude, maintaining dignity even in the most extreme circumstances, desperately trying to chip away at Skarsgard's stony exterior.