Pillion
Harry Lighton (2025)
Box Hill’s most famous literary appearance, hands down, is the picnic in Emma, where Jane Austen’s title character thoughtlessly insults Miss Bates and incurs the scathing wrath of Mr Knightley. But the first meeting of the two main characters in Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novella, named for the North Downs summit in Surrey, is memorable, too. On his eighteenth birthday, Colin, Box Hill‘s protagonist, is ambling in the title location when he trips over the outstretched legs of a leather-clad motorbiker, who’s taking a nap under a tree. The biker’s name is Ray. As Colin, the book’s first-person narrator, explains, he didn’t just fall for Ray; he literally fell over him. Colin, inadvertently but prophetically, is on his knees from the start. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ asks Ray. In this case, that familiar, amused rhetorical question has an answer: Ray acquires Colin as a domestic companion cum sex slave for a period of several years. Colin never gets his own key to Ray’s place in suburban Hampton, but he’s OK with the arrangement. He’s in awe of thirtyish Ray, incredulous that this tall, strong, glamorous man is willing to spend time with a short, fat, unprepossessing specimen like himself, yet the connection goes deeper than that: Colin is a thoroughgoing submissive. He narrates the story twenty-five years after its main events, which culminate in Ray’s death in a motorbike crash. Post-Ray but pre-internet, Colin has used small ads columns and phone lines to find new dominators. Box Hill’s subtitle is, ‘A Story of Low Self-esteem’.
Writer-director Harry Lighton’s debut feature, Pillion, showing at the London Film Festival, is an accomplished and highly entertaining adaptation of Box Hill. Pillion premiered in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Festival (where it won the section’s Best Screenplay award). Adam Mars-Jones wrote a Guardian piece at the time[1], describing how his book became a film and his own motorbike ride to Cannes to attend the Pillion premiere. In Lighton’s version, Colin, when he meets Ray, is a thirty-five-year-old, still living with his parents; and Ray doesn’t die. When he first learned about these changes, Mars-Jones ‘flinched’. He nevertheless gave permission for the film to go ahead, decently taking the view that ‘I couldn’t imagine pulling the plug on a project that someone had spent far more time adapting than I had spent writing it’. (Box Hill is very short, 110 smallish pages of well-spaced text.)
Despite Pillion‘s unconventional subject matter and unusual sexual explicitness, it illustrates, in some of Lighton’s main changes, a not untypical process of turning a novel into a film. First, the main actor’s appearance. Harry Melling’s eccentric face, unlike that of the book’s Colin, demands attention. (Melling’s puddingy look as a child actor, who came to prominence playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter pictures, is probably closer to Mars-Jones’ Colin: Melling’s bony adult face seems about half the size of his younger one.) Second, Lighton reshapes the plot strand involving Colin’s parents to create a sharper contrast with the unorthodox relationship at the story’s centre and make this subplot more conventionally touching. In the book, the parents’ marriage is happy to an almost pathological degree: the wife’s brief spell in hospital for minor surgery so destabilises the husband that he goes into what proves to be a slow, irreversible psychosomatic decline. In the film, Colin’s mother Peggy (Lesley Sharp) is suffering from terminal cancer; after her death, Colin’s kind, affable father Pete (Douglas Hodge) grins and bears it. Third, by having Ray disappear rather than die, Lighton gives Colin a somehow safer kind of heartbreak, then contrives for him a happy ending of sorts. Once Ray departs the scene, Colin meets Darren (Anthony Welsh); although the latter makes it clear enough that he’ll be in charge, the film’s closing scene, between him and Colin, has a hopeful tone (Box Hill‘s ending feels less resolved, more downbeat). It’s the capper to what has become, rather than a story of low self-esteem, a more fashionable tale of self-discovery – of knowing, and liking, who-you-really-are.
For those in the audience who’ve read Box Hill, what Harry Lighton has and hasn’t altered is itself enough to make Pillion absorbing – even though some of the changes are questionable, to say the least. Most important is the updating of the story, and the adjustment of its timeframe. In Box Hill, Colin’s relationship with Ray begins in 1975 and ends about six years later; Colin recalls the relationship and, more briefly, his subsequent life, from around the turn of the millennium. In Pillion, set in the present day, Colin and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) meet one Christmas and the film ends shortly after the next: Lighton nicely bookends his narrative with a barber’s shop quartet, of which Colin and his father are both members, doing what’s evidently their usual Christmas performance in a local pub. The home counties setting has changed, too, from Surrey to Kent. Ray lives in Chislehurst. His and Harry’s first sexual encounter takes place not on Box Hill but in an alleyway at the back of Primark on Bromley’s high street.
In the novella, Colin’s dad seems oblivious to his son’s sexuality. It’s after her husband’s death, in the mid-1990s, that Colin’s mum mentions she always knew her son was gay, and that she’s fine with it. In Pillion, both parents, from the start, aren’t just aware that Colin is gay but eager to see him happy in a same-sex partnership. Peggy says she likes the idea of Colin having a romance with a biker. She and Pete meet Ray for a few moments when he drops by at their house one night to pick Colin up, before the pair are living together; but Peggy is increasingly impatient to know more about her son’s new friend, to have him round for Sunday lunch, and so on. Lighton reasonably assumes that sixtyish parents in 2025 accept their offspring’s sexuality, whatever it may be, more easily than their 1975 counterparts. The trouble is, at least as far as Colin’s mother is concerned, this plays out rather as a confused version of a situation – a situation comedy, even – from fifty years back: Peggy encourages her timid son’s love life as a caring mother might once have encouraged an unmarried wallflower daughter who’s in danger of being left on the shelf.
Although Harry Melling plays his shy, awkward virginity at the start with persuasive sympathy, Colin, as a 2025 character, is something of a puzzle. Given that Melling, although not handsome, is eye-catching, and that Colin has such loving, open-minded parents, it’s surprising that he’s celibate until Ray appears on the scene. Gay ‘shyness’ half a century ago was often bound up with what someone’s nearest and dearest would think; you could more easily accept a thirty-five-year-old virgin Colin in the Box Hill context. A related, though relatively minor, detail … times change and the popularity of forenames with them. Colin and Raymond were much more usual boys’ names in the early post-war years than they would be a few decades later. Retaining these names from the original adds to Pillion‘s stuck-in-a-time-warp aspect. (In Box Hill, Colin’s parents are just ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, which makes Lighton’s choice of Peggy as her name curious, too, though Pete as his is fine.)
Yet the film’s Colin-Ray relationship works, thanks to the casting of Alexander Skarsgård. His combination of exceptional looks and talent for naturalistic acting makes Skarsgård the perfect embodiment of Ray – a man beyond Colin’s wildest dreams yet really happening in his life. Eschewing Colin’s narration, Lighton does well to stress Ray’s too-good-to-be-true-ness through other, minor characters – most memorably when Colin, who works as a parking attendant, shows Ray’s photo on his phone to a female co-worker (Christina Carty), who can’t help voicing astonishment, then showing it in her face as she looks at the photo and back to Colin. Skarsgård’s extraordinary height (6′ 4½″) and build are enough to dwarf Harry Melling (5′ 9½″) and restore the novella’s gulf between Ray and Colin. Ray also eclipses the other queer bikers he hangs out with, to a comical degree. As well as towering over them, he usually wears, in preference to the almost regulation black, predominantly white leathers. In Mars-Jones’ narrative, Colin goes on that first visit to Box Hill with Ted, a rather pathetic motorbike-riding boyfriend that Colin’s elder sister has recently dumped, and Colin notices Ted’s crash helmet smells of beer: ‘Perhaps he drank out of it … Perhaps that was his secret sense of himself, as a sort of Viking … the biking Viking’. That phrase, used sarcastically in the book, doesn’t feature in Pillion but Skarsgård’s Ray can’t fail to bring it to mind: if Lighton had killed him off, this Ray would have been heading straight for Valhalla. The image of Ray, wearing spectacles to read a Knausgård book in bed, supplies a different Scandinavian flavour that nevertheless reinforces Ray’s mystery; Skarsgård’s semi-American accent, which makes Ray vocally hard to place, is similarly effective in underlining his exotic quality. Where does this man come from – or go to (Colin never knows, either in the book or the film, how Ray spends his days)? By enriching Ray’s mystique, Skarsgård vindicates Lighton’s decision to remove the character without explanation.
In that sense, Ray’s vanishing without trace is slightly reminiscent of the disappearance of Terence Stamp’s mystery man in Pasolini’s Theorem (1968). Yet it’s also very different: it seems to be connected to Ray’s loss of complete authority. Pillion and Theorem are alike, too, in cleverly balancing serious and comic elements, though this viewer has to admit finding Pillion‘s BDSM partnership uncomfortable as comedy (as I’d also found Box Hill sometimes uncomfortable to read). Colin leaves Ray’s house each morning once breakfast is over; Ray lets him back in again each evening. Colin’s domestic duties include shopping, cooking and cleaning, except that Ray follows an inviolable weekly routine of reverently burnishing the motorcycle. The pair sleep in the same room and have whatever sex Ray decrees, but they hardly ever share Ray’s bed: he makes Colin kip on the floor. The longer duration of the relationship in Box Hill helps create a sense of stability in the relationship, however perverted it might seem, which the film can’t really achieve. The set-up is harsher here. Perhaps that’s why Lighton has the worm turn in ways that Colin doesn’t in the book. In Box Hill, Ray is fanatical about road safety yet dies when his bike skids on a patch of oil and crashes into a tree: his unexpected loss of control of the vehicle is double proof of Ray’s mortality. The film’s equivalent is for Colin to rebel verbally against Ray’s rule, then nick the bike that’s the expression of his immaculate autocracy. The rift between them is repaired but Ray is unnerved. He agrees to a day off from their usual master-and-servant set-up. They spend this together in Bromley town centre, where Ray is more human, therefore more vulnerable, than before. It’s the last time that Colin – or the film’s audience – sees him.
On Colin’s birthday, the other bikers gather outside Ray’s home, and the whole group heads off into the country. The outing includes a riverside picnic, and competitively kinky high jinks, that are mostly misery for the birthday boy. This episode (featuring a cameo from Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears in his screen acting debut) is overlong, but the scene in which Ray accompanies Colin for Sunday lunch at his parents’ home is the film’s most misconceived. Colin has already told Ray that Peggy is dying, in the hope this will persuade him to accept her lunch invitation, but Ray says no: there’s nothing to suggest what changes his mind. The frank, mutually insulting argument that breaks out between Peggy and Ray over the dining table, is quite implausible – it’s also hard to believe that Colin wouldn’t have paid for the debacle, once Ray got him back to his place. As already noted, the character of Peggy is generally unsatisfying, well as Lesley Sharp plays her. Pete, beautifully portrayed by Douglas Hodge, is another matter. The sequence at Peggy’s funeral might be thought incongruously conventional in Pillion but Harry Lighton takes this opportunity to retain the gist of one of the most charming bits of Colin’s narrative in Box Hill:
‘There’s a village with a quaint custom – there’s a prize of a side of bacon given every year to a married couple who haven’t had a single quarrel. It’s called the Dunmow flitch. Mum and Dad could have won that bacon year after year. They’d have got sick of bacon. They had every qualification. Well, apart from not living in Great Dunmow.’
Lighton puts Colin’s words into Pete’s funeral eulogy for his wife, Hodge’s delivery of which is a marvel. He’s also excellent when, after Ray’s shock departure, Pete loyally drives Colin round in search of him. In Box Hill, Ray dies with a fair chunk of the book still to go; there’s plenty about Colin’s subsequent relationship with his mother, as well as his sex and working life (he becomes a train driver on the London underground). Although Adam Mars-Jones characterises Colin and his family more fully than Lighton does, this, except for the Peggy problem, hardly disadvantages Pillion: for all Mars-Jones’ ingenious wit, Box Hill rarely avoids giving off a whiff of condescension towards the family. It’s no loss at all that Lighton jettisons other minor characters from the book (including Ted). The canines that he invents for the film get, as usual in screen drama, rather short shrift. When Colin and Ray have their first tryst by Primark, each has been walking his dog: it’s no surprise that Colin’s companion is a dachshund and Ray’s a Rottweiler. This pair’s brief encounter was enough to win a Palm Dog at Cannes but, once they’ve served their immediate comic purpose, the hounds are virtually out of the picture.
Pillion is far from perfect but Lighton’s confidence in his approach, right down to the choice of title, is bracing. I’ve seen some good stuff at this year’s London Film Festival – plenty of Sentimental Value, some elements of The Choral, Billy Crudup reading the menu in (the mostly disappointing) Jay Kelly. In terms of whole films, though, Enzo and Pillion have been the highlights. It would be good to see Harry Lighton’s first feature fare well critically and commercially. It will be fascinating to discover what Lighton does next.
19 October 2025
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/may/23/adam-mars-joness-cannes-diary-pillion-box-hill-cannes-diary