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Some films don’t announce themselves. They arrive softly, take a seat beside you, and then stay long after the credits, asking nothing and somehow getting everything.
Pillion did that to me.
It’s a restrained film, careful with its own weight. The kind where meaning gathers in the spaces between words. In the half-step forward, the glance held a beat too long, the body that hesitates before choosing closeness. It understands that desire doesn’t always want an audience, and that power doesn’t need to perform to be real. Sometimes it just waits, patient and observant.
Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling meet each other in that quiet. Skarsgård carries a deliberate stillness that feels loaded, like every movement has been rehearsed internally before being allowed to exist. Melling, by contrast, is open and searching, vulnerability worn without defence. What they build together isn’t showy or declarative. It’s tender in a way that feels negotiated, discovered rather than displayed.
What struck me most is how uninterested the film is in explaining itself. The intimacy between these men isn’t framed for translation or approval. It just exists. The push and pull. The testing of boundaries. The way affection and control circle each other, sometimes clumsily. Queerness here isn’t a statement or a symbol. It’s texture. Something lived in the body first, language catching up later, if at all.
The film trusts silence more than exposition. It lets awkwardness breathe. It lets longing look a little strange. It allows tenderness to arrive sideways, almost by accident. That patience means when the emotional moments do surface, they land with a quiet force. Nothing is underlined. Nothing is rushed to resolution.
There’s sadness here, but not the kind that demands collapse. More a low, steady hum. The feeling of people bringing their histories into new rooms, moving carefully because they know how easily things tilt. It’s about trying again without pretending the past didn’t happen.
By the end, I didn’t feel undone. I felt held. The way you do after a conversation that doesn’t fix anything but still matters. The kind that leaves you a little more aware of yourself in your own body.
Pillion isn’t chasing volume or legacy. It’s doing something quieter, and harder. It’s paying attention.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
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