Harry Lighton makes his feature debut with Pillion, a sleek dark comedy–romance with a dash of noir.
Lighton not only directs but adapts the screenplay from Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill, not simply translating the material but re-embodying its characters for the screen. Because the key to a great romance is not plot but people.
Adaptation is always an act of compression and reinvention—condensing, reshaping, and reinterpreting someone else’s vision. Pillion is a prime example. While the dialogue is crisp and the characters carefully drawn, it is also clear that elements of the source have been removed or altered in ways that ultimately reshape the narrative.
The film’s introduction and first act lack information and grounding, which weakens the opening. The opacity of Ray is part of what makes him alluring and almost mythic, but there are structural gaps that prevent the story from fully cohering. Colin’s intrigue and desire are not in question, nor is Ray’s selective attention toward him; what’s missing are the connective mechanics—the hows rather than the whys. Normally such gaps can be smoothed over through fluid staging, but the distinctly segmented blocking of scenes, especially early on, prevents that seamlessness from forming.
A related issue emerges in the third act, though here it is less structural than rhythmic. Abrupt pacing shifts disrupt the tonal continuity the film has carefully built. This falls as much on the direction as on the script—though in this case the distinction blurs, since Lighton serves as both writer and director.
The pacing struggles from the outset, as if Lighton is unsure how to usher Colin into Ray’s world without overexposing Ray and dissolving his mystique. The result is a tension between revelation and concealment that the film never fully resolves.
In many ways, Pillion functions as an arthouse counterpart to Fifty Shades of Grey, much as Call Me by Your Name did to Love, Simon: a character-driven love story centered on a BDSM dynamic, but concerned less with titillation than with interiority and emotional texture.
Visually, the cinematography evolves alongside the relationship. Early framing is loose and observational, as if watching events from a remove; as intimacy deepens, compositions tighten and precision increases, mirroring the characters’ psychological convergence.
Late in the second act, just before the third begins, several tightly framed shots register shifts in intimacy before the dialogue does. Their later love scenes occupy the same physical proximity yet exclude more background, transforming private encounter into shared space. By contrast, their earliest meetings isolate each body within the frame, emphasizing individual sensation—pain or pleasure—rather than mutual experience.
The score complements this restraint: clean, minimal, and never intrusive. It avoids emotional coercion, allowing actors and image to carry affect almost entirely on their own.
Alexander Skarsgård inhabits Ray with complete conviction. His restraint—the ability to reveal just enough vulnerability—is magnetic. Harry Melling meets him with equal force, delivering what is largely a career-best performance, though he slips slightly out of register in the film’s closing montage, marring what might otherwise have been flawless work.
By the time the credits roll, the film leaves a lingering sense of absence—a void newly discovered and only partially filled. The final movement articulates not an idealized notion of love but an experiential one: love as lived connection rather than cultural fantasy.