Pillion

Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water, yet nothing can surpass it.
—Lao Tzu

When Ray tells Colin that he has “a predisposition for devotion,” he is not offering a casual compliment: it is a diagnosis, a crucial acknowledgement. Colin is not merely willing to obey; he is structured for it, designed to bend, to find in submission not a loss but a form of belonging. Yet this devotion, so genuine, also becomes a double-edged blade: Ray eventually reaches a point where he can no longer control a situation that once appeared entirely in his hands. He cannot manage the feeling that arises from it. Confronted with the depth of that bond, Ray reacts.

It is here that the fragility of the man-who-dominates is revealed: his strength lies not in perpetual imposition but in his inability to sustain the uneven vulnerability that surfaces. In that moment, Ray is no longer merely the master; he becomes a frightened spectator of his own way of being, reflected back to him in an unexpectedly—and for him, intolerably—human form.

In Pillion, the incursions into the world of latex-clad bikers take on an almost bucolic quality, as if the clearing where they gather were a timeless appendage, a rural sanctuary in which the codes of domination transform into communal rituals. In these scenes, the men offering themselves up to their partner-masters do not appear degraded—though often comical or exaggerated—but rather immersed in a kind of earthly liturgy: bodies kneeling in the grass, lying prone on tables like consumer goods, eyes oscillating between fear and surrender. Submission becomes a pastoral act, a form of belonging that seeks in nature a frame of authenticity. It is as if the environment itself—the wind through the trees, the distant rumble of engines—were granting legitimacy to that power dynamic, revealing its most archaic core: the desire to give oneself over, to be held, to be recognized in one's impulse to serve.

In his debut, Lighton directs with a gentle, playful irony an implacable reality: he eschews sensationalism, preferring a sober, almost domestic realism. The film does not celebrate transgression as pure aesthetic shock, but as a terrain of inner discovery. Colin cooks, cleans, sleeps on the floor, shaves his head—acts that, in a conventional dynamic, might appear humiliating, yet within this relationship acquire an almost sacred, ritualistic value. It is as if each gesture were a step toward a form of freedom that is not rebellion, but surrender.

But Pillion is not merely an apologue of submission. It is also the story of a man who, through self-sacrifice, learns to establish his own boundaries. Colin wishes not only to serve, but to be seen, to be loved—and he asks Ray for something radical: a day of truce, a “normal” dimension of coupledom. When Ray refuses, it is not simply an erotic no; it is an existential refusal, a denial of the possibility that their bond might become something different, softer, more vulnerable, negotiable.

The film’s cinematography, the understated settings of the English outskirts, the contrast between Colin’s domestic home and the austere aura of the biker world—everything contributes to building a universe suspended between brutality and tenderness. Light, silence, and skin: Lighton uses these elements as instruments to probe the mystery of desire, to demystify power and reveal the intimacy concealed behind domination.

Pillion is a meditation on devotion as vocation, on how love can be at once liberation and prison. Ray does not seem ready to welcome what he has created: he does not know how to build a refuge that is not also a cage. And Colin, even while enduring the most extreme form of abandonment, emerges transformed: no longer merely a submissive, but a man who has dared to ask to be loved, even in his darkest desire.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
—Carl Gustav Jung