Master and servant: "Pillion"

A surprise arthouse hit to conclude a year otherwise lacking in them, Pillion turns out to be something like Alan Bennett's Cruising. Writer-director Harry Lighton has done to Adam Mars-Jones's novel Box Hill what his surname suggests, trimming its fingernails, softening some of the harsher humiliations, and coming up with a cosyish Britcom centred on an unlikely-to-utterly mismatched couple. Unworldly gay Colin (Harry Melling) can't believe his luck one Christmas after swaggering biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) gives him instructions to meet him round the back of the Bromley Primark. What follows, however, is less coming together than outright collision. On one side, the limit-pushing subcultures (biker, sub-dom) within which Colin prostrates himself before big man Ray, desperate for somewhere to belong; on the other, the English suburbia in which Colin was raised, settled, staid and sedate, conventional if not conservative in its thinking. Ray - tall, moviestar-chiselled, rarely seen without the leathers that lend his shoulders only further heft - strides into the latter like Iron Man walking into a prime-time BBC sitcom: he can only ever turn heads. But he's fundamentally a bit of an arsehole, even for a dom. In the pub where the two first meet, he obliges Colin to pay for his crisps, like a tuckshop bully. Invited round to Ray's flat, Colin is both surprised and oddly thrilled to learn he'll be cooking dinner himself; he's even more thrilled after his host invites him to stay the night, albeit curled up on a rug at the foot of Ray's bed. It is, to say the least, a curious situation for a young man to find himself in, yet the charm of Lighton's film resides in its gentle assurance that people get themselves in curious situations all the time. Colin and Ray's arrangement, such as it is, is no more curious than Colin's day job (traffic warden) or chosen hobby (barbershop quartet); some people just invite the world's onlookers to scream wanker! at them. Certain folks may even get a kick out of it.

That we don't harass Colin so is down to the way Pillion has been couched, carefully yet skilfully, as a leftfield love story, a gaining of wisdom that doubles as bruising suburban fairytale: Colin as the wide-eyed princess to Ray's alluring yet forbidding prince. There's not much to Lighton's film beyond two people striving to figure something out - or, more specifically, one person trying to figure the other out. (It may well become to queer audiences what 2002's Secretary and, to a lesser degree, this January's Babygirl were for the straights: a popcorn-friendly way of broaching all that powerplay business, at once salty and sweet.) But sometimes that's all a movie needs, particularly when you have the right actors in place. The funny-faced Melling proves exceptionally game, twisting himself into ever more uncomfortable positions, physical and otherwise, and in most of them the butt of the joke. By contrast, Skarsgård - 200 pounds of impermeable Nordic granite - is playing some version of his public image, an abstraction or ideal. We learn next to nothing about Ray - even the Karl Ove Knausgård tome we see him reading speaks more to actor than character - rendering him what he is to Colin, an altogether obscure object of desire. There's nice work, too, from Lesley Sharp and Douglas Hodge as Col's ma and pa, both a model of parental tolerance and reassurance for matinee viewers that this is respectable homegrown drama rather than any of that Fassbinder/Frank Ripploh filth. Lighton has a measure of mischievous fun with this particulars of this subculture: a sylvan awayday takes in a bare-assed man in a puppy mask, Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters and four more invitees bent double over the trestle tables. (Today's the day the teddybears have their picnic.) Yet this is one of those Britfilms where the relative smallness of everything works in its favour: it allows Lighton to keep a tight focus on two actors who've absolutely understood what this material is about. There are still, apparently, involving love stories for the cinema to tell; there are still, clearly, original ways for a director to film desire, longing and sex. Let's just say Pillion is the 2025 release on which those newfangled intimacy co-ordinators would have been busiest and most needed.

Pillion is now playing in selected cinemas.