The gay BDSM drama Pillion, starring Alexander Skarsgård, just had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it scored a seven-minute standing ovation. But it turns out what audiences saw was the “family-friendly version,” and there’s an even more NSFW cut of the film just waiting to see the light of day.

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Pillion is directed by Harry Lighton (his directorial debut following the award-winning short film Wren Boys) and based on the 2020 novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones. It stars Harry Melling as Colin, a “weedy wallflower letting life pass him by,” who has a chance encounter with Ray (Skarsgård), “the impossibly handsome leader of a motorbike club.”

“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,” the film description reads.

“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?”

The film, which already holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and “universal acclaim” on Metacritic based on early reviews, hasn’t just attracted notice for the emotional depth of its love story. It’s also full of kinky, uninhibited sexuality.

But for all the film shows audiences, there’s even more it’s keeping zipped up. In a recent interview with Variety, the director and cast revealed that there’s a “raunchier” version of the film.

“It was purely because I didn’t want to push the audience into feeling they were being deliberately shocked by an image,” Lighton said of his choice to edit the film. “So for example, there was one close up of a dick, a hard dick … like down the barrel of the lens. And after watching the film on that ‘fuck-off’ screen I thought, yeah, cutting it was probably the right decision!”

Skarsgård confirmed, “There’s definitely a raunchier version of this movie … what you’ve seen is the family friendly version… there’s also the Alexander Skarsgard cut.”

And it sounds like there may be even more edits on the horizon for Pillion to get a wide release, that of making sure to “de-shine” some uh…bodily fluids. “Apparently that’s what pushes you over the edge!” Lighton said.

But while the film is full of borderline explicit content, it is also a story with heart. “What’s so interesting about it, for me, was how it feels so relatable and familiar, but maybe dealing with a subculture that people aren’t so familiar with,” Melling said. “It was how those two things interplay that I found so fascinating. You were taking romantic comedy tropes and subverting them.”

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