From time to time, I’m paying closer attention to the films, books, and essays that stay with me. Not as a critic, but as a writer learning to look more carefully.
I often watch or read at surface level, for pleasure or distraction. Lately, I’m slowing that down, noticing what unsettles me, what mirrors deeper questions about identity, power, belonging, and ageing. This is an occasional series where I explore those responses, and what they’re teaching me about writing with more depth and honesty.
Pillion is a quietly unsettling film about how identity is shaped, stretched, and sometimes lost inside intimate relationships. At its centre are two finely judged performances that hold an uneasy imbalance from the outset: Alexander Skarsgård as Ray, and Harry Melling as Colin.
Colin is young, gay, and still loosely tethered to family expectations and the sense that he should be “settled” by now. When he meets Ray, the attraction is immediate and uneven. Ray is confident, physically commanding, and fully embedded in a BDSM subculture where roles are clearly defined. Skarsgård plays him with an unsettling calm. He does not negotiate his place in the world. He already knows who he is.
Melling’s Colin, by contrast, is searching. What begins as a sexual encounter quickly becomes a form of apprenticeship. Colin learns how to be the devoted one. He shops, cooks, waits, submits. He dresses as Ray wants him to dress. He absorbs the rhythms and expectations of Ray’s world. The film shows how quickly this happens, not through overt coercion, but through the quiet pull of belonging. Colin wants to be wanted. He wants to fit.
The title Pillion is telling. Colin is always riding behind, close, dependent, carried forward by someone else’s direction and speed. The motorbike becomes a powerful metaphor for the relationship itself. Ray controls the movement, the pace, the destination. Colin holds on.
What the film does particularly well is resist easy judgement. The BDSM community is not portrayed as inherently abusive or sensational. Instead, the focus remains on psychological asymmetry. Ray’s dominance is stable because it is anchored in an established identity and community. Colin’s submission is more fragile, because it doubles as a search for self. The pain he endures is not only physical. It is the cost of becoming someone through another person’s desires.
The relationship begins to fracture when life intrudes. Grief, vulnerability, and the longing for something more mutual unsettle the roles that once held everything together. Ray wants the relationship to remain as it was. Colin begins to want more than the place he has been given. A pivotal motorbike sequence, reckless and stripped of protection, captures this rupture with visceral clarity. Colin’s body acts before his mind can fully explain why.
After this, something fundamental has shifted. Ray briefly looks after Colin, but the emotional distance has already opened. When Ray disappears, the loss is not only of a lover, but of a structure. Colin’s father, quietly present, grounds the film again in the ordinary world Colin had tried to leave behind.
The ending avoids melodrama. Colin does not revert to who he was before, but neither does he remain defined by who he became with Ray. What he carries forward is understanding. He creates a new profile, meets someone else, and steps into another relationship with greater awareness of desire, limits, and selfhood. It is not a neat resolution. It is a credible one.
Pillion is ultimately a film about adaptation. About how we shape ourselves to be loved, and how sometimes that shape fits, until it doesn’t. It captures something quietly painful about intimacy: that becoming “us” always involves negotiation, and that the cost of belonging can be highest when only one person is allowed to stay fully themselves.
