Pillion

The Architecture of Devotion

I have always been suspicious of movies that try to explain why people fall in love. Mostly because love, especially the kind that reorganizes your entire life overnight, rarely makes logical sense to anyone standing outside it. Harry Lighton's debut feature, *Pillion*, does not bother explaining. It simply drops us into the deep end of an obsession and asks us to swim. Adapted from Adam Mars-Jones's 2020 novel *Box Hill*, the film has been cheekily marketed as a "dom-com." (And sure, there is a wry humor to the whole thing.) But underneath the leather harnesses and the motorcycle exhaust, this is a surprisingly tender study of what happens when yielding control is the only way you know how to ask for care.



Colin is a parking enforcement officer who still lives with his parents. As played by Harry Melling, he is a portrait of perpetual apology. Melling has a compelling physicality—he seems to constantly fold inward, making his already slight frame look even smaller. We first meet him in a cozy Bromley pub on Christmas Eve, singing in a barbershop quartet alongside his father. It is an aggressively quaint existence. Then Ray walks in. Alexander Skarsgård plays Ray not just as a biker, but as an architectural event. When he leans against the bar in full motorcycle gear, the room seems to tilt toward his center of gravity. He spots Colin. A note is passed. Later that night, in a frigid alleyway behind a shop, Ray simply tells Colin to get on his knees. Colin does. I am not entirely sure I breathed during this sequence. Lighton shoots it without sensationalism, focusing instead on the electric shock of realization on Colin's face: he has finally been given an instruction he wants to follow.



What follows is a relationship of extreme, codified inequality. Ray demands absolute obedience. Colin moves into Ray's immaculate home, where he cooks the pasta, wears a padlock around his neck, and sleeps on the floor at the foot of the bed while Ray casually reads Karl Ove Knausgård. (A clever, ridiculous visual joke about male ego that tells you exactly what kind of movie this really is.) Most directors would turn this dynamic into a thriller or a morality play. Lighton goes the other way. He finds the domestic banality inside the kink. There is a peculiar comfort in knowing exactly what is expected of you, and Melling captures that relief beautifully. How do you play someone who takes up no space, yet command the screen? Melling does it by letting Colin’s devotion become its own kind of power.



Skarsgård has the harder job, perhaps. Ray is essentially a withholding mechanism wrapped in leather. We learn almost nothing about his past. Yet watch Skarsgård's hands when he adjusts Colin's collar. There is a gentleness there that contradicts the harshness of his rules. Is Ray a bad dominant? Maybe. He pushes boundaries without much aftercare. Yet the film does not judge him, nor does it victimize Colin. *Rolling Stone*'s David Fear noted that the film "never forgets there is a deeper story happening underneath all the sex." That story is about self-actualization. Colin is not losing himself to Ray; he is using Ray’s strict parameters to locate his own edges for the very first time.

Whether that lands for you depends entirely on your tolerance for ambiguity. There are moments in the third act where the emotional restraint feels a bit too rigid, as if the script is afraid to let things get messy. I caught myself wishing for just one crack in Ray's polished facade. Yet life does not always give us the cathartic screaming matches we want. Sometimes people just recede. What remains is Colin, standing a little taller, carrying the weight of his own desires. He is not fixed, and he is not broken. He is just finally riding in his own seat.