Kinky Sex, BDSM Alexander Skarsgard and Gimp Masks: ‘Pillion’ Seduces Cannes With 7-Minute Standing Ovation

Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling brought a heathy splash of BDSM to Cannes on Sunday with the premiere of Harry Lighton’s “Pillion” in the Un Certain Regard section.

The film earned a hugely enthusiastic seven-minute standing ovation and, in perhaps a Cannes first, saw Skarsgard hug a man dressed in a gimp mask as the audience whooped and cheered. For the occasion, Skarsgard was wearing leather trousers (which he flaunted on stage).

Before the screening, Lighton said he wanted the film “to make you laugh, make you think, make you feel and make you horny.”

Marking Lighton’s feature directorial debut, “Pillion” follows “Colin (Melling), a weedy wallflower letting life pass him by,” its official synopsis reads. “That is until Ray (Skarsgård), the impossibly handsome leader of a motorbike club, takes him on as his submissive. Ray uproots Colin from his dreary suburban life, introducing him to a community of kinky, queer bikers and taking all sorts of virginities along the way. But as Colin steps deeper into Ray’s world of rules and mysteries, he begins to question whether the life of a 24/7 submissive is for him. Has he found his calling, or simply swapped one form of suffocation for another?”

“Pillion” was produced by Element Pictures, the Oscar-winning company behind Yorgos Lanthimos films including “The Favourite,” “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness.” Launched at the Cannes Market last year, the film’s screenplay was penned by Lighton and based on Adam Mars-Jones’ “Box Hill,” which was the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize winner.

Skarsgard, known for his work in Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” and HBO’s “Succession,” was last at Cannes with 2011’s “Melancholia,” directed by Lars von Trier and also starring his father, Stellan Skarsgard. For “Harry Potter” actor Melling, “Pillion” marks his first time premiering a film at Cannes.