Pillion: BDSM & Kinky Sex – why do you want to dominate me?

Pillion: Harry Lighton’s debut film moves through BDSM, desire, and power between London and the woods

Colin (Harry Melling) is young, awkward, and withdrawn. He lives with his parents in a London suburb. He writes tickets for a living. At night he sings in an a cappella quartet in local pubs, the kind of places that sit outside the city’s mythology.

Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) lives in a different physical vocabulary. He rides a motorcycle. He works out. He goes on picnics with biker friends in the woods. He lives alone in a stripped-down apartment. He plays the piano. He reads Knausgård.

On Christmas night they meet in a London alley. Ray drops to the ground, licks the tip of Colin’s boots, then gives him head. That’s how their love story starts—this is the opening beat of Pillion, Harry Lighton’s debut feature.

A domestic contract: obedience, silence, and the shape of a life together

Colin moves in with Ray. He cooks. He washes. He tidies. He does the grocery shopping. He sleeps on the floor. He follows every instruction Ray gives him.

Ray, meanwhile, offers nothing of himself. No explanations. No updates. No answers. How he feels, what job he has, where he goes during the day, where he disappears at night, what kind of future he imagines—none of it becomes available. Ray sets the rules. Colin lives inside them.

Pillion grows from this imbalance. It’s a film built on missteps. It refuses the polite moment where the relationship gets clarified. It stays quiet when questions would normally be asked. It moves through strict routines and ordinary rituals. Then, without warning, it breaks open: scenes that are grotesque and arousing, fights, and adventures in the woods.

The film pulls apart the assumptions that hold up a traditional relationship. Then it starts again from what’s left. It swerves. It accelerates. And the viewer—like someone riding pillion on a motorcycle cutting through the coldest night—watches a new kind of love take form.

Kink as emotional language: Pillion and the sentimental rewrite of Box Hill

What “pillion” means, and what it signals in biker BDSM culture

“Pillion” is the English word for the passenger seat on a motorcycle. The place behind the rider. In gay biker BDSM culture, it also names the one who gets dominated inside the couple.

Harry Lighton’s first feature, written and directed when he was thirty, premiered at Cannes in 2025. It won Best Screenplay in Un Certain Regard, then went on to win two British Independent Film Awards and a Gotham Independent Film Award.

The film is a very loose adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’s 2020 novel Box Hill. Lighton changes the ending, reshapes the relationship between the two men, and seasons the material with love.

Pillion works like a rom-dom-com: a romantic comedy where domination is not a twist but a method. Kink becomes a way to test the limits of contemporary relationship models, and to look directly at male vulnerability.

While researching the film, Lighton spent time with members of the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club (GBMCC). They became consultants and appear in the film as themselves. One of them, Paul Tallis—a Welsh gay biker living in London—met Lighton during pre-production. Harry Melling spent a day riding behind him, learning the community’s codes: BDSM etiquette, boot-licking, and the stance of a submissive.

What “kinky” means: practices, language, and consent in an alternative relationship model

Kink as an umbrella term

“Kinky” comes from kink: a twist, a bend, a knot—also a quirk, a fetish, an oddity. It’s an umbrella term that can include erotic, sexual, physical, and even spiritual practices.

It can mean fetish play, sexual attraction toward specific objects or body parts—feet, latex clothing. It can mean spanking as part of erotic play. It can include sex toys: vibrators, crops, floggers. It can include role-play: acting out characters or scenarios to heighten arousal.

There’s also impact play, where a dominant strikes a submissive with hands or objects, lightly or intensely. Bondage. Sensation play, where the goal is stimulation through the senses—hot wax, ice. Sharps play, involving sharp objects such as needles, knives, or scalpels. Breath play, which involves restricting oxygen.

These activities must be approached with maximum safety, full awareness of risk, and mutual respect.

Kinky sex can also be understood as an alternative relationship model, where people act outside conventional scripts. It’s an explicitly asymmetric relationship, but the positions are conscious and named—unlike many conventional relationships where inequality exists, but stays unspoken.

Inside BDSM: desire, responsibility, and the rules that govern power in intimacy

Roles, negotiation, safewords, and aftercare

Pillion—like Fifty Shades of Grey before it, or Secretary—puts BDSM dynamics on screen.

The acronym breaks down into bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

The structure is straightforward: a dominant person (a top) holds control over a submissive person (a bottom). Someone who enjoys both roles is often called a switch. The relationship can be described as D/s, and it operates under a basic principle: SSC—safe, sane, and consensual.

Consent has to be real. It has to be negotiated. Limits have to be defined. Risk has to be reduced. And partners agree on a safeword, used when either person wants the scene to stop.

When it ends, aftercare matters: the time dominant and submissive take to return to ordinary life. Some do it together, talking, showering, giving a massage. Others do it separately. There isn’t one correct method. What matters is discussing it in advance.

Aftercare can extend into the following days to avoid what some call a “drop,” the moment when negative feelings can surface after a scene.

Relationship benefits and safety culture: how kink builds spaces, rules, and belonging

Community, education, and event codes

A 2019 Censis report estimates that kinky practices are now part of the lives of 4.5 million Italians. Research and anecdotal evidence often point to relationship benefits for couples who practice kink: clearer communication, more intimacy, less sexual boredom, and a stronger sense of shared attention.

A study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine suggests BDSM practitioners may score as less neurotic, more extroverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, and less sensitive to rejection.

Around these practices, communities and infrastructure have grown. FetLife is one of the largest social networks built for kinky communities. Workshops are often led by professional dominants or submissives and fetish specialists. Play parties—events where kinky people meet and play—have also become more common.

For newcomers, the language in event listings matters. Two acronyms show up often. RACK means “risk-aware, consensual kink,” a reminder that participants understand and consent to the risks of each activity. NMIK means “no minors in kink,” and signals that minors are not allowed.

Before some events, organizers may host a preliminary meet-up, allowing people to get familiar with the space and the participants before anything happens.