Film Review: Pillion (2025)
Pillion: A Leather-Clad Liturgy of Power, Pleasure, and the Price of Belonging Reviewed by Kaelib Reece
He said “get on,” and I did.
Not just in the film, but in the shadows of another night, another life, back when the Sydney air still smelled like Dunhill Reds and pheromones, and the backroom of The Midnight Shift offered more initiation than invitation.
Harry Lighton’s Pillion, cracked wide open from the bones of Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill, isn’t really a debut. It’s a detonation. A slow, gleaming, gasping explosion dressed in leather and silence. Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, it’s a film that doesn’t hold your hand. It cuffs it. Holds it behind your back. Asks you to kneel, not for punishment, but for perspective.
And yes, let’s speak plainly, it’s soaked in leather.
As a vegan, I recoil. The smell, the sheen, the narrative built from a corpse. I know what it cost, the skin stripped from the back of a once-living being, turned into kinkwear and coded masculinity. It repulses me. It always has.
But desire is not a thing that bends to ethics. Not cleanly.
Pillion makes that mess visible. Makes it cinematic. The leather is not just costume, it’s character. It clings to every frame, creaking like confession, humming with the contradictions of sex and slaughter, dominance and damage. I hate it. I want it. I watch anyway.
The boy, our narrator, is eighteen. Empty. Waiting to be written on. And Ray, the biker who takes him in, is the kind of man who’s never had to ask. Ray doesn’t do softness. He does possession. And in Ray’s world, love is indistinguishable from ownership.
There is a rhythm to this film, like the sound of boots on bar floors or fists against flesh, deliberate, repetitive, ritualistic. Lighton lingers in the silences. Doesn’t fill them. He lets us flinch. Lets us wonder who is using whom. Consent is present, but unstable. Like a safeword whispered too late.
“You ride pillion,” Ray says. “You hold on. You don’t ask where we’re going.”
It’s not just a line. It’s a life.
And it was mine, once. I was barely twenty. Picked up, ruthlessly, by a leather couple at The Shift. Taken home. Turned into property. What started as flirtation soured fast, into captivity, degradation, the kind of "scene" you don’t script. Locked in. Used. Told I belonged to them now. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be kept. I escaped. Barefoot. Breathing hard. Still unsure, even now, what to name it, as I ran homeward down Glenmore Road, Paddington. Abuse? Rape? A misunderstanding about what queerness owes masculinity?
Pillion doesn’t tell my story. But it knows the terrain. The muddy, molasses-thick place where want and wound collide.
And then there's the leather again, everywhere. Wrapping bodies like flags. Like lies. I can’t look at it without remembering every animal turned into icon, every boy turned into bottom, every silence mistaken for safety. But Pillion doesn’t glorify it. It interrogates it. It asks: what does it mean when our symbols of pleasure are stitched from someone else’s suffering?
There’s a scene I still can’t shake. The boy kneels and polishes Ray’s boots. Not sexually. Not quite. It’s a sacrament. A surrender. A prayer that says, see me, use me, make me matter. It hit like ritual. Like the first time I begged to be held and was instead harnessed.
Queerness here isn’t kind. It’s not rainbow-drenched or pride-parade safe. It’s raw, rough-edged, working-class, and scarred. These men fuck like they’re exorcising something. And maybe they are.
Ray’s gang isn’t woke. It isn’t inclusive. It’s full of men who never had the luxury of therapy or TikTok terms. Their queerness is feral, unfashionable, deeply formed by class and trauma. But it’s real. And Pillion doesn’t flinch from that. It lets them exist, complex, cruel, charismatic.
I thought of Sydney again. The old Darlinghurst days. The leather bars. The way some men gave you a nod and a collar and called it care. How we built our queerness from the ashes of AIDS and apathy, and sometimes the only power we had was the power to endure.
The final scene is almost silent. The boy, now jacketless, stands at the edge of somewhere. He’s not triumphant. He’s not broken. He’s just… himself. Finally. Maybe.
And I sat in the dark, raw. Still vegan. Still hating leather. Still remembering that house I escaped. But I didn’t look away.
I let it mark me.
Verdict: I wanted to love this film.
On first watch, I admired it. The performances felt raw. The chemistry was feral and convincing. The leather, the engines, the heat of it all, it pulsed. I mistook discomfort for depth.
However, something curdled.
What unsettled me wasn’t the kink. I am not scandalised by power exchange. I have lived long enough in queer spaces to know dominance and submission can be negotiated, ecstatic, liberating. But I have also lived long enough to know what happens when they are not.
What disturbed me was the romantic framing of Colin’s diminishment.
We watch Colin shrink. We watch his world narrow. His friendships thin out. His voice grow faint in the presence of Ray. The film frames this contraction as evolution, as initiation, as if becoming smaller in another man’s orbit were a rite of passage.
That hurt.
I recognised that choreography. The way intensity masquerades as intimacy. The way control arrives dressed as protection. The way isolation feels, at first, like being chosen. I have been Colin. I have felt that gravitational pull. I have watched parts of myself go quiet in the name of love. The first time I watched Pillion I saw transgression. Later I saw erasure.
There is a difference between depicting a toxic dynamic and aestheticising it. This film lingers lovingly on the sex, the leather, the ritualised dominance, and then flinches when it comes to consequence. It does not interrogate the imbalance hard enough. It does not ask whether Colin is expanding or disappearing. It assumes that surrender equals growth.
No.
In a world where queer men are still unlearning models of masculinity that bruise us, this story feels regressive. It confuses dominance with emotional depth. It confuses silence with strength. It packages possessiveness as romance.
I left the viewing uneasy, and not in the good, art-should-disturb-you way. Uneasy because I recognised the pattern. Because I have sat in leather bars where devotion sounded like obedience. Because I have defended dynamics that were quietly hollowing me out.
The film thinks it is bold. I think it is nostalgic for a version of queer desire that mistakes damage for desire.
I don’t admire it anymore.
I hate it.
Not because it is provocative. But because it mistakes harm for heat, control for care, and Colin’s shrinking for transcendence.
And I am tired of watching queer men disappear on screen and calling it love.