Harry Lighton’s debut feature “Pillion” (2025) circles a dominant-submissive relationship, shading it with the protagonist’s journey of self-awakening. Based on Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novel “Box Hill,” “Pillion” is a tricky balance that can be fudged if the makers aren’t careful. Refreshingly, Lighton demonstrates a firm grasp of tonal variation, swinging between comedy, glee, and daring plunges.
The submissive Colin (Harry Melling) could easily have been shown as disrespected or defiled beyond dignity’s clutch. The film does stray to those limits, but in a manner that enhances and expands Colin’s sense of being and purpose. “Pillion” charts a trajectory from debasement to empowerment. It’s fraught, thrilling, and nevertheless essential to recognize the depth and nature of his wants and needs.
Lighton is unafraid to play with expectations and character delineations. It’s a gruff romance spiked with tenderness and ache, as Colin realizes he cannot forsake himself entirely for the dominant’s wishes and commands if such a stark dissonance registers so intensely and unavoidably. In order to face a reappraisal, the relationship with Ray becomes a necessary rite of passage. Without it, he wouldn’t have edged anywhere close to where he does reach.
Pillion (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Colin is a mild, undemonstrative traffic warden, the looks of whom you couldn’t possibly detect capable of the slightest transgression. But his remarkable evolution over the course of a significant relationship alters everything you may believe about and assess him. There are huge reassertions which are quietly dramatic and boundary-breaking in scope.
As he grapples with change and self-acceptance, the film primes its moving lessons. He grows wiser even if it arrives through heartbreak, rejection, and abandonment. The desolation becomes key to the eventual nourishment of his identity, the cascading hurt a conduit for self-reckoning. It’s bitter but necessary, the wounds critical to opening up pathways he hadn’t previously thought to exist.
For major things to rise through, he has to rip himself apart, and only then will transcendence seem remotely likely. It’s an arduous, demanding journey that demands complete submission and acknowledgement of the emotional toil. The film is as much about Colin’s initial dormant longings as it envelops his gradual awareness of what exactly he seeks. His mother sets him up on a date.
It’s a leather suit-clad biker who barely speaks. But Colin is immediately drawn. The sexual tension is instantly felt, which binds Colin to the man (Alexander Skarsgard). On the first encounter, Ray just asks him to obey his order: suck his dick. No further communication is encouraged, Ray telling Colin he’s too naïve. But this rebuff doesn’t succeed in dissuading Colin.
Does Colin distance himself from Ray?
He waits and hopes for Ray to turn up at the pub. Colin persists. Soon, Ray takes him in as a partner, though everything you’d expect from such a term barely reflects in the relationship that unfurls. When Colin moves in, he’s instantly assumed to take on the cook’s responsibility. Ray keeps dumping household duties on him, whilst treating him far more severely than his pet. Ray lets his dog sit on the couch, while Colin is strictly commanded to sleep on the rug. It’s purposefully debasing, and Ray knows the effect he has on Colin. To a lay viewer, this could strike as an arrangement rife with manipulation and exploitation, one person slumping everything on another.
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However, pleasure moves to its own peculiar beats. The film develops this with gradual detail but owes no impulse to niceties or polite underselling. Colin is so sucked in that he forgets his life outside what’s determined and implicitly controlled by Ray. Ray’s domineering inclination insists Colin turn himself in as slavishly as possible. This entails a complete change of appearance.
How does Colin please Ray?
Colin shaves off his scruffy hair and wears a steel chain on his neck. It’s a rude shock in the front. Obviously, this disconcerts Colin’s dying mother to a great degree, even as his father tries to be a mediator, calming the room down before sentiments get heated. But Ray’s approval is paramount to Colin, who shapes and calculates his entire being around him.
To appease Ray is Colin’s primary task, fully of his own accord. Colin deflects the worry his parents are naturally in, taking great pride in Ray appreciating his efforts. Colin smilingly tells his colleague that Ray compliments him on his aptitude for devotion. This is how Colin assuages his ego. It’s what keeps him doing: tiny doses of validation.
This relationship functions through dire bits. Ray feeds some, and Colin hungrily steps forth to take it with glad yearning. To have a dashing boyfriend, like Ray, also gives Colin a projection of an elevated social image. He can show off a bit to his colleagues as they are awestruck by how he scored someone as arresting as Ray. Of course, the details of the relationship are kept in the dark.
Pillion (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Does Colin find Ray?
Colin and Ray’s relationship hits various stumbling blocks, but the former pretends everything is hunky-dory. It almost feels he gets off on the heartburn, the denial elongating into ecstatic pleasure. At a bikers’ day out with other submissives, Ray first indulges another’s sexual thirst. Only later does he proceed to Colin, whose appetite has been firmly stoked.
Ray accepts Colin’s persistent request to meet his parents over a meal. There are pleasantries initially gestured by Colin’s mother until she finally cracks. She stipulates her son’s right to a transparent relationship. Why is everything so mysterious about Ray? What secrets does he hide?
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The pretty niceties give way to resentment and aversion as a mother pleads for her son’s dignity. Of course, there’s a good deal of storming out of the table. But the anxieties of his mother have struck a chord in Colin. The guy knows it’s not all fallacious. He does deserve some humane understanding. The denouement is a stretched one, indulging in the snug fantasy of the couple reverting to what every regular one does.
It’s what Colin asks of Ray. They go out for a date in the city, cuddling in the theatre. Ray is intrinsically discomfited but tries to roll with the punches. Colin is delighted and satisfied with his dream day turning out well. However, when Colin leans in for a kiss, Ray’s face clouds with fear and consternation. Immediately, Ray rushes away.
That’s the last Colin sees of Ray. The man practically disappears, his carefully assembled stack of preferences disrupted. After a period of mourning and heartache, the film closes on a hopeful note, a few months later. Colin pairs up with another DOM. This time, however, the rules of the relationship are more equitable and teeming with clarity.
Pillion (2025) Movie Themes Explained:
Power, Identity And Masculinity As Refracted Through BDSM
The film plays with and mulls on the dom-sub relationship without the slightest judgment. It’s radically open to possibility, suggestion, and effortless experimentation. Yes, the path is riddled with difficulty and tension, awkwardness and hesitation. But it can bend away to release and freedom, knowing where you stand and live after crossing the wires of uncertainty.
Colin is hurt and belittled to an extraordinary degree. He suffers and endures, all in the hope that the protracted pleasure will be worth the wait. But the ground of the equation is too skewed, too unstable, with wildly diverging expectations from the other. If the two aren’t headed in the same direction, it’d only be catastrophic.
This is what happens with Colin. He has to submit, surrender, and shatter his heart in order to renew himself and envisage how he situates himself vis-Ã -vis relationships. He has to go through incidents that tear him apart so that he can prevail and move towards relationships that are healthy and where he can be valued. It is laced with complicated power games, wherein he assumes to throw away respect would get him closer to Ray. He has it all messed up and learns to re-evaluate his position.
“Pillion” is about intimacy and power as they are arranged and remoulded in conversation and contrast. The film isn’t shying away from tough, demanding conversations, pointing to Colin slowly gathering his confidence and mustering the strength to say what he wants, clearly and unequivocally. Of course, Colin’s wants are so misaligned with Ray it ends disastrously despite a veneer of promise.
But it nudges him in a direction of greater growth. Colin is willing to be submissive as long as his desires are heard and reciprocated, not baulked at and denied as Ray does. Once there’s a tipping over to a more welcoming, compassionate equation, Colin can have a sense of true, ideal personhood. He gets a fresh lease of confidence and resolve, vaulting towards a better sense of life and identity.
The film’s culminating sequence suggests optimism and vitality for Colin as he steps into a more fulfilling relationship where his end of the bargain would just as well be honoured. Only then can such a thing work beautifully, unlike the trainwreck that occurred with Ray, which was a mangle of disbalanced expectations.
