by Hudson Moura
“Pillion,” the word for the back seat on a motorbike, becomes an apt metaphor for a romance structured around riding behind someone else’s desire, will, and direction. The film Pillion, written and directed by Harry Lighton, is a gay-drama-romance structured around an asymmetrical relationship whose very premise is power: Colin (Harry Melling), a sensitive holiday carol singer and self-effacing “wallflower,” becomes fixated on Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the strikingly attractive leader of a motorbike club. The film’s initial charge derives from contrast—between Colin’s apparent ordinariness and Ray’s charismatic force, and between Ray’s singular allure and the rougher biker milieu surrounding him. What begins as manipulation and domination, in a relationship explicitly organized as one-way, gradually shifts into something more unstable and revealing, without asking the viewer to forget how coercive the original arrangement is.
Skarsgård is excellent as Ray, channeling a familiar, muscular intensity—detached, imperious, and affectively sealed off from those around him. Ray’s posture is one of control: cold, egocentric, and seemingly incapable of tenderness. Yet the film’s dramatic wager is that transformation can occur even in such a figure, though largely beneath the surface. Colin’s change is easier to read externally—his comportment, confidence, and sense of self are visibly reconfigured as he enters Ray’s world of rules and “mysteries.” Ray’s evolution, by contrast, is staged as predominantly internal: the slow emergence of feeling and attachment where none seemed possible, a movement toward Colin that does not erase Ray’s dominance but complicates it.
Crucially, Pillion remains self-aware—and critical—about the abusive potential and ethical imbalance of this couple dynamic. The film does not romanticize domination as inherently desirable, nor does it present submission as uncomplicated liberation. Instead, it permits dissenting voices within the diegesis to name the relationship’s inequality and to question its fairness. The character of Peggy, Colin’s dying mother, played with force by Lesley Sharp, embodies this critical function most pointedly: her perspective refuses sentimental gloss and presses the film toward judgment rather than indulgence.
The film’s central tension is thus not whether Colin will be “changed” by Ray—he will—but whether that change constitutes a genuine calling or merely a substitution of constraints. As the synopsis frames it, Colin may have exchanged one suffocating life for another; the narrative’s power lies in making that question remain active rather than resolved in advance. By pushing both protagonists toward extremes, Pillion uses a provocative relational structure to stage deeper encounters with self-knowledge and otherness—Colin’s openly legible transformation paired with Ray’s harder-to-access interior shift.
Given its focus on a BDSM-structured relationship and mature themes, the film is clearly intended for adult audiences. Within that frame, its distinctive achievement is to sustain a compelling, unexpected, and emotionally potent dynamic while keeping its ethical unease in view—allowing attraction, critique, and character change to coexist without collapsing into simplistic romance or moralizing certainty.
Rating: 4/5