Pillion lead Alexander Skarsgård planted a kiss on Pedro Pascal’s cheek during a standing ovation for the kinky gay biker romance at Cannes Film Festival.

Starring Skarsgård and Harry Potter‘s Harry Melling, kinky queer Sub/Dom biker romance Pillion received an seven minute standing ovation at Cannes Film Festival and ‘magnificent’ reviews – with Skarsgård planting a kiss on Pedro Pascal’s cheek

The film was premiered along with a flurry of other queer flicks over the weekend (18 May) at Cannes, and is based on Adam Mars-Jones’ 2019 novel Box Hill.

Following the Harry Lighton-directed film’s climax, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section, the theatre erupted into a reported seven-minute standing ovation, during which Skarsgård, dressing in leather trousers and biker boots, gave none other than Pascal a smooch.

We’re not jealous.

The film’s synopsis details that Pillion follows Colin (Melling, best known for his role as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter series) as a weedy wallflower, “until Ray (Skarsgård), the impossibly handsome leader of a motorbike club, takes him on as his submissive.”

It continues: “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?”

Reviews for Pillion have been glowing. Deadline writes that “Skarsgård understood the assignment, slipping seamlessly into his role as the sexually dominant yet elusive Ray, who’s fearless in communicating his every desire, but emotionally closed off to any real intimacy as the leader of a gay biker gang.”

The Hollywood Reporter adds, “Both Melling and Skarsgård show an intimate understanding of how the power dynamic between their characters works, but what gives Pillion its kick is the friction sparked when Colin starts wanting more.”

The Guardian reports that “Pillion is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side, to where Colin has grown or at any rate changed as a person who has come to terms with what he is and what he wants, the way that Ray clearly did long ago.”

And happily, the Daily Mail have said that the film contains several “graphic sex scenes” Nice.

Other queer films to be screened at Cannes include The History of Sound (starring Challengers’ Josh O’Connor and All of Us Strangers’ Paul Mescal) and The Chronology of Water – Kristen Stewart’s highly anticipated directorial debut.