Pillion arrives as one of those rare literary adaptations that feels both faithful to its source and strangely freer in cinematic form. Harry Lighton’s debut feature balances sharp humour, vulnerability and moments of real emotional turmoil with an ease that’s hard to categorise. The film is part romance, part character study, part deadpan comedy of manners and the whole thing is held together by two superb central performances.
In broad strokes, the film follows Colin (Harry Melling, excellent), a traffic-enforcement officer whose world is small, orderly and emotionally fragile. He lives at home with his gentle, cancer-stricken mother (Lesley Sharp) and warm, slightly bumbling father (Douglas Hodge). Colin’s life changes the day he attracts the eye of Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), an aloof, impossibly self-assured biker whose charisma borders on the tyrannical. What begins as a brusque invitation behind a Primark, turns into a relationship built on obedience, ritual and a power imbalance so stark it is alternately funny, erotic and deeply moving.
Lighton’s adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s Box Hill is surprisingly tender beneath its BDSM surface. The film honours the book’s exploration of erotic submission while leaning harder into the humour of Colin’s situation—especially the moments when his two worlds threaten to collide. There’s a rich comedic awkwardness in seeing Melling’s sweet, eager-to-please Colin flit between domestic chores in Ray’s bland Chislehurst home and Sunday barbershop rehearsals with his dad, dressed in boaters and bow ties. But the comedy never cheapens the emotional edges; instead, it exposes the vulnerability of someone desperate to belong to someone, even if that someone barely acknowledges him as a partner.
Melling is remarkable—soft-spoken, wide-eyed, and quietly heartbreaking. He plays Colin’s submission not as stupidity, but as a kind of awakening, a discovery of an identity he both craves and fears. Skarsgård, meanwhile, gives Ray a chilly, statuesque power that is never simplified into villainy. He’s magnetic, insufferable and strangely pitiable: a man who has built his entire sense of self around control because he doesn’t know how else to love.
The film’s tenderness crystallises in scenes with Colin’s parents, particularly Peggy, who sees far more of Ray’s emotional limitations than her son can admit. The Sunday lunch sequence where Ray submits to familial small talk, is a miniature masterpiece of human interaction. It’s also where the film’s questions about coercion, agency and devotion sharpen: is Colin fulfilled or exploited? Is Ray cruel or simply incapable of gentleness? The film doesn’t moralise; it trusts the audience to hold the contradictions. In short, there’s no kink-shaming here.
By the final act, Pillion gently shifts from a story about domination to one about self-recognition. Colin emerges changed, not necessarily stronger in the traditional sense, but clearer about the contours of his own desires and limits. The closing moments, underscored by his father’s barbershop quartet singing “Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking,” are unexpectedly moving. They reaffirm the film’s belief that love, no matter how unconventional or asymmetrical, can wound us, shape us, and ultimately release us from our own personal prisons.
This funny, raw and surprisingly tender film once again proves that Harry Melling is the former Harry Potter cast member to watch.
