Melissa Anderson
Harry Lighton’s new film, starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård as an odd couple, plays like a sub/dom rom-com.
Harry Melling as Colin and Alexander Skarsgård as Ray in Pillion. Courtesy A24. Photo: Chris Harris.
Pillion, written and directed by Harry Lighton, opens in select theaters February 6 and nationwide February 20, 2026
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Sub/dom, top/bottom: while the possibilities of gender have expanded and multiplied, certain other categories are immutably binary. The title of British filmmaker Harry Lighton’s debut feature nods to this either/or lexicon. A passenger seat on a motorcycle, “pillion” also signifies, in kink argot, the one who cedes full control to the dominant “driver.” The central pair of Lighton’s movie assume both the literal and figurative positions: timid Colin (Harry Melling) rides pillion on the treasured motorbike owned and operated by ultra-butch Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), who, when they’re not roaring down the road, rams Colin’s orifices and keeps the eagerly biddable chap in a state of extreme domestic servitude. Roles and rituals, codes and customs are strictly adhered to—until this rather tedious theatricality gives way to something even more banal: Colin’s self-actualizing journey.
Pillion is adapted from Adam Mars-Jones’s pensive 2020 novella Box Hill, which is recounted retrospectively from Colin’s first-person POV. Looking back as a forty-two-year-old in 1999, Colin details the six years, 1975–81, that he was with Ray. Their initial meeting occurred on Colin’s eighteenth birthday, when the hapless lad tripped over the size-twelve feet of the biker, who is about a decade older. The slim text is suffused with mordant ruefulness. “In a strange way he freed my choices, though he seemed to take them away,” Colin notes of Ray, finding paradoxical liberation in the fact that “someone else was taking responsibility.”
Alexander Skarsgård as Ray and Harry Melling as Colin in Pillion. Courtesy A24.
Peppered with Colin’s droll, self-deprecating remarks about his physique—“being pear-shaped is fine, but only if you’re a pear”—Box Hill presents his unconventional relationship with his leather-clad dom as a deliverance of sorts: “Ray’s charisma was real, and I wasn’t the only to feel it. But I went along with it. It’s only exaggerating a little to say that I knew what I was doing when I fell over those long and insolently extended legs. I was ready. I had no real idea of what I was ready for, but still I was ready.” Yet Colin is also quick to distinguish his volitional abjection from nonconsensual assault. On his initiation into anal sex by Ray, he recalls: “The body I had experienced as decisiveness and strength I now suffered as sheer weight and invasion. He pinned me down. And what had begun as a rough seduction ended as, well, rape.”
Douglas Hodge as Pete, Lesley Sharp as Peggy, Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, and Harry Melling as Colin in Pillion. Courtesy A24. Photo: Chris Harris.
The nuances, the melancholy, the glancing back are all absent from Pillion, set in today’s Bromley, a London suburb. (The title of the book by Mars-Jones, a British cultural critic and fiction writer, refers to a location in the Surrey countryside.) The film’s Colin isn’t a teenager but an adult, though one still living at home with his coddling parents: cancer-riddled, fiercely protective Peggy (Lesley Sharp) and exceedingly congenial Pete (Douglas Hodge). A parking-enforcement officer by day, Colin enjoys square pursuits in his spare time, like singing in a barbershop quartet with his father. While performing one evening at a pub during high Yuletide, Colin meets Ray. An alleyway assignation is arranged for Christmas night. Treated by Ray—a Tom of Finland drawing made flesh—as not much more than a mouth and tongue, Colin gobbles the biker’s Prince Albert–adorned cock and licks his boot.
Harry Melling as Colin in Pillion. Courtesy A24.
“What am I going to do with you?” Ray asks during this encounter, those eight words something of a logorrheic outburst from the taciturn dominator. The normally halting Colin has a ready response: “Whatever you want, really.” The exchange replicates almost verbatim one found in Box Hill. But Lighton’s movie doesn’t include this question from Ray that appears in the source: “Why did I take you on?” The query isn’t dialogic; Ray always supplies the same malicious answer: “No one else would have you.”
Harry Melling as Colin and Alexander Skarsgård as Ray in Pillion. Courtesy A24. Photo: Chris Harris.
Much of what passes for humor in Pillion relies on the physical disparity between the lead characters and the actors playing them: Skarsgård, a chiseled six-four Nordic Adonis, and Melling, a jug-eared, unprepossessing fellow. (The average-looking Englishman’s earliest role may exacerbate this juxtaposition. Melling first made a name for himself in the Harry Potter movies as Dudley Dursley, the boy wizard’s spoiled, roly-poly cousin. In a perverse exercise of cognitive dissonance, we can imagine that brat from a money-minting family franchise now grown up as we watch Colin get vigorously cornholed.) When a coworker can’t hide her bafflement over how Colin landed someone so gorgeous, he politely corrects the term she has used: “He’s not my boyfriend. We have an arrangement. . . . He says I have an aptitude for devotion.”
Alexander Skarsgård as Ray and Harry Melling as Colin in Pillion. Courtesy A24.
That talent will be demonstrated again and again when Colin begins to spend more time at Ray’s sterile home, where the submissive will not be allowed to sit on a couch or sleep in a bed. Where—when he’s not being sodomized by Ray—he is kept busy doing the laundry and making potatoes dauphinoise. The routine dulls; the drama goes slack.
After Colin begins to yearn for more (affection, a sleeping surface that isn’t a hardwood floor), Pillion detumesces further. Ray preposterously agrees to a “day off” from their standard role-playing. The butch top swaps out his leather for cozy flannel and denim; the two men enjoy vanilla-couple pleasures like going to the movies, eating Thai food, and kissing. It proves too much for the man who seemed, in all senses of the word, impenetrable.
Harry Melling as Colin in Pillion. Courtesy A24. Photo: Chris Harris.
Ray vanishes. Colin survives and thrives. Pillion plays like a sub/dom rom-com, wearily plotted in such a way that callow Colin, by the end, knows exactly what he wants, filling in the “About Me” prompt in a dating app with nonnegotiable specifics. Tidy, teleological, Pillion offers no image or feeling as provocative as that summoned by this passage from Box Hill: “Being ignored has always stirred me up somehow. I feel unworthy, naturally, but I’m also tuned up by it. . . . As if a man is only a man if he takes no notice of me.”
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, is now available from Film Desk Books.