La Petite Mort

Harry Lighton’s film ‘Pillion’ offers a discreetly sanitized version of gay BDSM.

By Enzo EscoberAugust 14, 2026

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

OF ALL THE FABRICS we wear to arouse, it is leather that most radically determines the tenor of our sex. Silk, lace, and the rest are perfunctory comforts. Leather is never incidental—it must be committed to; it makes demands. A survey of its pornographic canon affirms this. Tom of Finland’s cops and sailors borrowed their power from institutions; his bikers had a sovereign talent for dominance. So long as the black hide gilded their bodies, their rank was inviolable, their flesh immortal. This perhaps is because leather is itself made of flesh. Its crime is unmistakable, flagrant, as ancient as the first hunter to crawl into an animal’s skin. To fornicate in leather, then, is to enact a carnal rite between predator and prey. The prey sees its own future in the garment, yielding, against all Darwinian judgment, to the fate of the object. Some of us pursue this fate, while others wait until they meet their match in a master.

Harry Lighton’s film Pillion, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, is based on the splendid 2020 novella Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones. In it, a homely British lad is propositioned by a stoic, muscular biker: he is to be, 24-7, the man’s worm, his cook and maid and punching bag, in return for nothing but the privilege of worshipping his cock. Colin (the young man) and Ray (the biker) enter into this arrangement not through the stringent argot of contemporary consent culture but through brusque decrees, dismissive gestures, and a tacit acknowledgment of how their glaring physical differences dictate the power differential. They barely converse: Colin never discovers what Ray does for a living, when his birthday is, or whether Ray is even his actual name. Their relationship is not fair, but it is pure.

This is about as much overlap between book and film as Lighton allows. It’s a necessary choice since, in reimagining his source text, he has contorted it into something resembling a rom-com. Mars-Jones’s Colin, an overweight, sexually inexperienced 18-year-old with one leg that trails behind the other when he runs, might charm the reader with his wry English levity, but there is a disquieting aspect to his absolute devotion, a perfectly debased hunger. “If there are to be leaders then there must be followers,” he tells us, “and I had followership skills in plenty, just waiting to be tapped.” Later, he states things more plainly: “I could never have loved someone who was only ever good to me.”

Lighton’s Colin, meanwhile, is of more conventional stock. Several years older and several pounds lighter, he is a hero to root for, a blundering best friend type who never quite penetrates the heart of darkness. Actor Harry Melling makes his doubts kinetic, intimating in his stammer a moral panic—is abjection really his cup of tea? This uncertainty forms the central conflict of a film some critics have called transgressive: a young man in his first relationship must decide if he likes it.

In both versions, Colin is a product of his time. Lighton, in his feature debut, has transposed the action from its original 1970s setting to the present day. “There was something about the time period [of Box Hill] specifically […] that I felt kind of made it less original as a piece because of cinema which has come before,” he said during an interview at the New York Film Festival last year. “And […] it closed down questions about Ray, because, you know, if the story is set in the seventies, then I think the kind of enigmatic quality of Ray […] is quite easily answered by […] the kind of social, legal pressures to be discreet in that era.”

It is with this wholesale renunciation of both fidelity to source material and nuance of interpretation that Lighton has launched his career as a director. Pillion, written for an audience that should be more receptive to raunchy gay sex than any in history, is instead a familiar kind of bildungsroman, a parade of romantic tropes redressed in black. Alexander Skarsgård, who plays Ray, promoted the film by wearing an outré BDSM-themed outfit to its red-carpet events. His sartorial project mirrors that of Lighton’s: shock that does not entice so much as court parody.

We meet Colin in the back seat of his parents’ car, the first in a series of visual nods to the film’s title. Part garden gnome, part Pillsbury Doughboy, he has tarried too long in the limbo of childhood, gazing out the window to watch a helmeted biker race into town like a toy. Because he sings in a barbershop quartet with his father, his world has a darling quality, easy and twee. During one of their performances, his cancer-stricken mother (a formidable Lesley Sharp) brings a man she hopes to set him up with, an affable, sexless bear who shows up to the quartet’s pub gig in a T-shirt that reads “Alexa, Free Britney” in shiny letters. Midway through the hopeless ordeal, Colin is approached at the bar by Ray, and when his face glides slowly into frame beside Colin, one can only laugh at it. Handsome actors are a dime a dozen, but it is Skarsgård’s special talent to put his icy good looks in service of absurdity.

After wordlessly scrawling his number on a card, Ray vanishes, and on Christmas Day, the odd pair reunite in an alley for an introductory blow job. (You can guess who services whom.) So begins Colin’s sexual education—which, in both of the screenings I attended, elicited scattered giggles from the audience. He licks a boot, is tackled in an assless singlet, and is made to wear a padlock around his neck. Their domestic life is founded on servitude: Ray does not permit any man to join him on the couch, much less kiss him. Outside, the two are joined by kindred freaks. Ray gives Colin a buzz cut and inducts him into his biker gang, a group of men who ride, play cards, and fuck one another. The camera wanders over their seminude bodies: a pair of black latex gloves snap into place over taut forearms, while leather pup masks convert human speech to barking.

Colin should be grateful. After all, Ray has rescued him not only from the nuclear family model but also from the tediousness of gay normculture, a postmodern wasteland of hookup apps and rainbow flags emblazoned with brand logos. Yet Lighton, a skeptic of the queer alternative, ensures that this very world remains in view, beckoning gently, laying its own subtle claim.

At its Cannes premiere, Pillion won Best Screenplay in the Un Certain Regard section, which showcases emerging talent. It is being distributed in the United States by A24, a multibillion-dollar media machine that nonetheless retains some cachet among cinephiles for its indie stylings. Yet it is essentially a work that midcentury American critic Dwight Macdonald would have called “midcult”—a cultural product that harbors high creative ambitions yet remains tethered to the conventions of commercial media (which Macdonald called “masscult”).

A distinct feature of masscult is that its intended effect is built in: a sitcom laugh track, for instance, tells the audience what to find funny. In the scene where Colin is first ordered to sleep on the floor of Ray’s bedroom, the plaintive piano music stimulates our pity and orients our judgment—a relationship this aberrant is surely a pathological one. Similar directives are found in the script itself. Though Colin’s loving parents, in Mars-Jones’s original novella, do not meddle in his personal life, Lighton’s film brings them to the fore as emissaries of tradition. In one difficult dinner table scene, Colin’s mother admonishes Ray for his reticence. Since she is bald from chemotherapy, her outburst feels righteous—we’d be heartless to side with the man who gets off on humiliating this woman’s son. Two scenes later, we are at her funeral, as if to silence any naysayers.

The ensuing events mark the most striking tonal departure from the novella. Grief-stricken and exhausted, Colin breaks his pact with Ray, imploring him to instate a “day off” where the two can at least playact as lovers. The following morning, Ray leaves his leathers at home to participate in the experiment. They promenade, go to the movies, take a stab at conversation. Skarsgård does good work here conveying an endearing sort of stuntedness—one begins to see Ray not as a menacing discipline freak but as a socially handicapped rarity. In a spectacle of unbridled teenage éclat, they chase one another through the streets, crash in a park, roll around in the grass, and, for the first time, kiss. But no spell is broken. Ray is a romantic invalid, a creature whose attachments threaten to explode his sense of security. When their lips part, his face glazes over with a look of emotional insolvency: he is saying goodbye.

By the next day, Ray has skipped town, his boy is alone, and the gang rides on without either. Back with his barbershop quartet, Colin recovers by getting on the dating apps. “I’ve been told I have an aptitude for devotion,” he writes on his profile. Rules are set in place: he’ll never buzz his hair again, and he is to have a weekly day off. “The rest of the time,” he finishes, “your wish is my command.” In the final scene, he meets a handsome rugby player who looks on with approval as Colin bends down to tie the man’s shoelace. Their chemistry is arbitrated by preset conditions and algorithms that protect their best interests. The future is promising because they have adhered to a sanctioned script.

Colin’s happy ending, then, is a reward for his newfound Goldilocks sensibility: personal comfort refined by moderation. This is not a lesson that comes from the sexual underground but from polite society. Like a delinquent youth who needs to prove a point, Pillion can only sojourn in the periphery before it returns home, reformed. It never attempts a meaningful study of submissive need—the unique disposition that impels one to dissolve the self in order to become another’s conduit for pleasure. Instead, it takes as its most urgent concern the correctness of sexual relationships, whether or not they conform to an acceptable humanist framework. This is how an unrated film about kinky gay bikers comes to feel so didactic.

Still, Lighton’s creation has its own unwitting merits. All films represent an engagement with their times, and viewing Pillion as a document of our own yields valuable insight. Mars-Jones’s novella is an ode to a pre-AIDS milieu whose strictures begat a covert but decadent erotic avant-garde. Pillion, meanwhile, is firmly grounded in a neoliberal era that actively subsumes gay men, especially white ones, under a streamlined sexual economy premised on legibility. As Heated Rivalry (2025– ) has proven, it is now possible to tell a gay story that straight audiences can embrace.

Pillion is not so different. In distancing Colin from Ray’s apostate lifestyle, Lighton reveals something critical about gay men today: we are more allied to normative society than we have ever been. Colin has the option of living as an integrated member of modern-day England; we thus cannot expect him to wander too far into its margins. What does it say about our sexual politics when a film about dominance and submission feels so avoidant of danger? Only that a vital aspect of desire has become foreign to us, so beyond the confines of our newly inclusive picket fences that we’ve begun to convince ourselves it doesn’t exist.

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If there is a film that haunts Pillion like a patriarch’s ghost, it is Scorpio Rising, the 1963 cult classic that was the first to triangulate biker culture, queer eros, and death. Directed by Kenneth Anger, the author of the sensationalist show business tell-all Hollywood Babylon (1959), its 28-minute plot is cobbled together from original and borrowed footage, a trippy collage that somehow anticipated the modern music video and, later, the idiom of Tumblr.

Things kick off, naturally, with some foreplay. A motorcycle parked in a garage is disrobed of its protective sheet. A young man in a tight T-shirt lovingly polishes it until the chrome gleams, a handsy act of worship. A group of bikers don their leathers like knightly regalia. Anger’s gaze is reverential: his camera savors the sight of smooth, muscled flesh, with his protagonist, a biker he found in Times Square who went by the nickname Scorpio, as his idol. A soundtrack of jukebox pop—Elvis Presley, Martha and the Vandellas—constructs his world, but because dialogue is totally absent, we also feel displaced.

As Scorpio sets out on the prowl, scenes are spliced in that show Jesus leading his disciples through Jerusalem, a nod to the biker gang’s sense of fellowship, its phallic formation. This sequence is soundtracked by Little Peggy March’s rendition of “I Will Follow Him,” an English-language adaptation of the 1961 Franck Pourcel instrumental “Chariot,” whose melody we also hear echoed in the opening scene of Pillion in the form of Betty Curtis’s Italian cover. On my first watch, I believed the song to be a thoughtful homage, until I discovered that Lighton is the type of artist who suffers so acutely from anxiety of influence that he would sooner avoid a seminal work than be inspired by it. “I wanted for this film visually to be a new version of gay biking,” he said in an interview with Letterboxd, admitting that he’s never seen Scorpio Rising. “I was kind of reacting against that,” he continued, a perplexing statement to make when you have no actual conception of what it is you’re reacting against.

This “new version of gay biking,” artfully denatured of risk, forms the official aesthetic of Pillion’s gentrified kink. Lighton is the posh duke to Anger’s witchy madman. In spite of its subject matter, the film is oddly frictionless, whereas Scorpio Rising is still, to this day, a queasy fantasy of abjection difficult to integrate into any queer politics of respectability. During the final stretch of Anger’s film, images of Adolf Hitler and swastikas flash on-screen, suddenly turning the bikers’ benign antics sinister. In a vignette Georges Bataille might have enjoyed had he not died a year before its release, Scorpio gets behind a church pulpit, takes a piss in a chalice, and offers up his urine as communion. The film ends when a man is seemingly killed in a motorcycle racing accident, a moment its director insists was a real death captured on camera.

Anger, it must be said, is an infamous fabulist, having allegedly claimed he gathered material for Hollywood Babylon by means of “mental telepathy, mostly.” But veracity isn’t what’s at stake here, nor is shock value. What Pillion has surrendered is Scorpio Rising’s camp bravura, not to mention cinema’s fluency in human desire—its ability to metabolize its life-affirming energies as well as its undeniable tilt toward fatalism. It is this latter, destructive impulse that underwrites the need for speed, the power of loud distorted music, the sex appeal of the rakish man who wears his leathers as a warning. This man’s cult is marred by troubling connotations, but beneath the surface, he has no real ideological animus. Instead, his body—robustly healthy yet suggestive of death—expresses what has always been true about eroticism, which is that a subterranean current of violence runs through it.

Try as we might, we cannot guarantee that our pursuit of pleasure will be strictly in our self-interest. This is an essential feature of sex, yet contemporary queer liberalism has difficulty accommodating it. In a panicked state of denial, it insists almost exclusively on positivity, on straightforward gratification and self-empowerment. Eros and Thanatos were bedfellows long before Freud wrote his famous essays, and the fact that we can get off on the specter of annihilation is a testament to this duality. But in the absence of new ways to articulate this truth on-screen, queer filmmakers have become too skittish, too beholden to the customs of a society that now admits us into its ranks so long as we stay on our best behavior.

This is one reason why the queer alternative feels so anemic these days: each subversive flourish feels fraught with real political ramifications. There are newfound rights to lose, and a hard-won triumph over the stigma of AIDS. To portray our own desires as somehow disordered, unhealthy, or in any way a threat to common decency would be an act of treason. And so, we have chosen self-policing as a form of self-preservation. This is why Colin cannot enjoy the callous sex or the anarchist tribe or the designation of freak. Never mind that we have historically been at the vanguard of sexual expression—in gay cinema today, everything must feel as safe as a PrEP pill.

Lighton himself laid bare this dissonance in the Letterboxd interview: “There were moments in the filming where we felt like we were crossing into actually a version of aggression, which felt wrong,” he said.

In the first blow job scene, we did takes where it felt on the verge of Ray brutalizing Colin. There are obviously versions of BDSM which do push into that territory very consensually. It just didn’t feel right for this film, where Colin’s such a naive submissive. We felt we had to be quite careful with that line between aggression and desire, or unwanted aggression.

One wonders, however, what sort of film might have been made had Lighton allowed for some greater measure of abrasion. What new images might have been generated by an unsparing inquiry into the dynamics of dominance and submission? How might a more daring Pillion have reacted to our contemporary predicament, where everything feels permitted but also surveilled? In other words, what wayward pleasures might have been discovered, then recklessly satisfied?

In Box Hill, Mars-Jones makes a point of emphasizing Ray’s ironclad code of conduct. He adheres to the highway’s speed limit, forbids his fellow bikers from drinking while driving, lives by a strict workout regimen, and requires everything to be placed exactly where it belongs. Yet where Colin is involved, Ray departs from his rigid sense of order. They fuck raw on the side of the road, in full view of passing cars. They enter a straight bar in full regalia, Colin attached to his master by a leash. “Ray was big on self-control, and he didn’t know when to stop,” he recounts. “He loved rules, and he loved to break them, that was the thing.” What Mars-Jones’s characters understand about constraints is that they can be hijacked, torqued, mocked, and channeled into a new theater of the obscene. There is, after all, a freedom to be had in those cruel games, even though it may not look like freedom at all. One searches in vain for any hint of such spontaneity in Lighton’s calibrated correctness, and thus for any insight into the secret of Ray and Colin’s love.