In a stuffy English pub, a boy in a goofy barbershop quartet ensemble is wordlessly cruised by a man in biker’s leather, offered only a time and place scrawled on a holiday card. As directed, the boy arrives in the alleyway of their local Primark on Christmas night. Among empty grocery delivery boxes, the boy fumbles through a blowjob (he’s much better at licking the man’s boots) before thanking him for the opportunity. He smiles down at his own muddy knees when he returns to the home he shares with his parents.
I was so excited, so explicitly moved, after watching Harry Lighton’s Pillion for the first time that I couldn’t sleep. Pillion’s protagonist, Colin (Henry Melling), is a young gay man from an incredibly supportive family. His aforementioned barbershop quartet is populated by himself, his father, and his brothers. His mother is doting. Even as she battles cancer, she attends her family’s pub performances and sets her son up on dates with local boys. She’s even able to spin Colin’s trip out to meet the biker from the bar into something romantic and not gritty, happily sending him on his way after their holiday dinner.
If Colin and his family are like something out of an Aardman animation — kind, loving, endlessly accepting modern British working-class folk who put a positive spin on just about everything — then biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) is sprung from a Tom of Finland drawing. He’s imposingly tall, strong, and sharp, pristinely dressed in motorcycle leathers, and constantly trailed by a massive Rottweiler named Rosie. Ray is the perfect dominant fetish object: he speaks very little and very plainly, is shockingly attractive, takes what he pleases, and makes Colin feel both degraded and desirable.
As Colin and Ray embark on their dominant and submissive arrangement, Ray’s demands often evoke an expression of beatific pleasure on Colin’s face. If sexual pleasure is one of the last frontiers that we can access, provide, and enjoy without cost, then I’d say the proclivity for and subsequent successful acting out of anything under the multi-tiered umbrella of BDSM is one of our only free and self-creating, mind-altering substances. In Adam Mars-Jones’ Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem (the short novel from which Pillion is adapted), Colin’s first sexual interaction with Ray begins when Ray clicks his fingers wordlessly to demand a blowjob from Colin. Colin says:
“The second click of his fingers resounded in a space that was not around us. It resounded inside my head. I felt as if he had clicked his fingers in the deepest part of my thinking, producing a brain event like the one that triggers a fit.”
The pleasure that Colin and Ray are able to derive from each other is strictly outlined and, in many senses, uncomplicated. The “rules” are so simple as to never be laid out as anything contractual or listed, but learned through feel or Ray’s singular command. Colin is to cook dinner, Colin is to sleep on the floor, Colin is to complete the list of tasks that Ray leaves out for him by the alarm clock, Colin is to leave the house and fill his time when Ray is out during the workday. It is not a relationship, but instead an “arrangement.”
In return, Colin “gets” things, yes, like a chance to wrestle with Ray, be claimed by him under a collared lock and key, and to be fitted for his own leather biking gear as he rides pillion to Ray. These are extras, though. Most important is the fact that Colin gets to serve Ray. That service and submission are the pleasure.
What I love about Pillion is that it shows a lived-in BDSM dynamic that is entirely feasible without fanfare. For those who have yearned or fantasized about trialing the lifestyle but have been fed a diet of inaccessible or complex kink instructions, the dynamic in Pillion includes a tangible example of things you could maybe try, or ask for; all you need is an egg for an omelet or a floor to sleep on. The way that Colin and Ray live in their dynamic only really requires their shared mental understanding of the dynamic and some practice of ritual.
Pillion is striking in its representation of a BDSM that uplifts the heady act of submission and service itself, highlighting the vulnerability in an act such as sleeping on the floor or kissing a boot. I believe that moments like these in Pillion can appear “small” when we compare them with other, more dramatic cultural understandings of BDSM. I think BDSM can — even after a decade of full-force (and sometimes imperfect) sex positivity and various BuzzFeed and Jezebel-esque essays on why having a kink is just fine — still evoke the mental image in civilian lifestyle of a dominatrix performing complex whip maneuvers in a chain-laden dungeon. While this is obviously an option (hooray!), I think some of this cultural understanding, undeniably for the worse, comes from the Fifty Shades of Grey series.
Writing about the pitfalls of Fifty Shades of Grey in 2026 feels a little bit like trying to pitch a threesome story to Jezebel. We have not just been there, we have been there seven billion times. There is perhaps very little need to return to this space. But I feel that, if Pillion showcases everything I love about BDSM as a practice and BDSM’s capacity to be portrayed in film — its understanding of the heady feelings submission and dominance can evoke, the spiritual gifts it can give to people who are perhaps flawed or wounded but feel held in their BDSM practice — then Fifty Shades of Grey is its dark-sided counterpart.
I am not going to say that Fifty Shades of Grey is bad because of a lack of correct BDSM ethical practice or “representation.” If I tried to critique it by whether or not what happened in it was good kink practice, I would have to throw most of my favorite art about BDSM under the bus as well.
Rather, Fifty Shades of Grey sucks so bad because it isn’t even about BDSM. College-student-turned-book-publisher Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) are not drawn together by any shared desire to partake in sadomasochism or submission and domination. In fact, for most of the series, Anastasia is repulsed by Christian’s desire to partake in any form of BDSM with her. The duo go through a long, complex flirtation period where Christian courts her not as a romantic or sexual partner but as a submissive — in this interpretation, someone who signs an in-depth contract and is given a separate bedroom in his house.
Christian’s debauchery takes place mostly in his “red room,” a dark, silky, leathery place where he goes to enact sadistic urges with his submissive. The red room is a space of useless excess. The various impact implements that line the walls of the red room often repeat themselves: the exact same toys lined up next to each other, same color and same design.
Both Anastasia’s “kept woman” room and Christian’s needlessly inventoried “red room” are shining examples of Fifty Shades‘ actual biggest fantasy: that of being a kept woman in order to remove yourself from any financial constraints. Fifty Shades is a capitalist fantasy. Anastasia is disgusted by and saddened over Christian’s actual internal desires, though she can sometimes derive pleasure from a fancy silk blindfold or a flogger. The only time BDSM is appropriate or of interest in Fifty Shades is when it involves the showing off or utilization of a purchasable sexual item. (Their most traumatic sexual foray occurs when Christian flogs Anastasia with his own leather belt — perhaps the only object that Ray and Christian would share.)
Both Christian and Anastasia see his proclivity for sadism as a character failing, something shocking and grotesque. His desire to spank Anastasia is the Phantom’s facial disfigurement, the Beast’s hairy, toothy form — and, indeed, because Fifty Shades was originally a Twilight fanfiction, Edward Cullen’s insatiable bloodlust.
I feel a little silly writing about Fifty Shades in conversation with Pillion, as the cinematic world of BDSM is so much richer and deeper than these two films. But I think there’s something to be said for the way that Pillion feels like an antidote to whatever culturally allowed for Fifty Shades to become a billion-dollar phenomenon.
Fifty Shades and Pillion are both movies centralized around repeated acts of sadomasochism and a dom/sub dynamic. In Fifty Shades, these repeated arcs of blindfolding-to-spanking-to-missionary occur because this is all that can be imagined. Any act of BDSM has to either be somewhat unpleasant for Anastasia, shameful for Christian, or surprise them both by being mostly okay (and these “mostly okay” interactions almost always spiritually have a “sponsored by Adam & Eve” snipe attached). In contrast, Colin and Ray’s strict and simple regimentation allows for a spaciousness of self. Colin submits so that he is liberated from obsessing over his sense of self: all he has to do right now, at each moment, is the thing Ray has told him to do (“In a strange way, he freed my choices, though he seemed to take them away,” Colin muses internally in Box Hill). In Fifty Shades, the only good part about BDSM is that it allows you to accumulate a lot of stuff: the same paddle three times, the same three fox-tail butt plugs. In Pillion, the practice is the pleasure, and the camping trips and parading through town in new leather gear are for the sake of adding a textural experience to the dynamic (or, equally important, maintaining a like-minded community, as Colin and Ray do these things with fellow leather bikers). The collar and biking leather Colin is gifted carry immense weight because of their submissive representation, not because they are nice things.
Fifty Shades is also obsessed with the birthplace of Christian’s “wound” — whatever it is exactly that is causing him to act sadistically. Christian is, in his own poetic words, “fifty shades of fucked up.” In the rare moments in which Fifty Shades is about BDSM, it’s about two vague sketches of “people” who are tasked with deciding between either “fixing” or gritting through one party’s sadistic sexual proclivities.
Christian’s mother was a sex worker who died of a drug overdose, and every woman that he takes under his sexual contract looks a little like her. This is gnarly, yes, but I find tidy social explanations of why people like the things they do sexually to be both boring and reductive. Sometimes there is a birthplace for our fetishistic attachments, an easy Freudian one-to-one. Sometimes people are into something just because. Most likely, the proclivity is born somewhere in between these spaces. I don’t find any of these narrative arcs particularly valuable, because I think — not to sound, once again, like every sex-positive digital publication of the 2010s — that acts and fantasies that derive sexual pleasure (and are consensual) do not need to be intervened upon, or even parsed apart. I think that BDSM likely does attract people who are wounded, desiring stability, or insecure. And I think it’s really nice for anyone to find something that makes them feel good. What makes Ray and Colin perhaps struggle in the rest of the world — Ray’s icy precision, Colin’s “aptitude for devotion” and somewhat sheltered simplicity — is what makes them thrive in their dynamic.
For Colin and Ray, there are probably emotional catalysts for their respective aptitudes for devotion and chilly rigidity. There are, perhaps, even hints, such as when Ray becomes defensive at the singular dinner he has with Colin’s folks and snaps at Colin’s mother (and maybe, by extension, his own) for trying to judge something that she doesn’t understand.
One of the best, most essential parts of Pillion is that Ray and Colin’s arrangement does not work out. Ray’s capacity to be a dominant is out of a wet dream: he’s chilly, beautiful, direct, a little scary, willing to listen but not guaranteed to agree or concede. Ray seems to have no family, though crucially, he does have community. Colin and Ray’s sexual proclivities do not occur in a vacuum, and Colin is welcomed into a group of like-minded fetish friends. But all of what makes Ray a masturbatory image is also what makes him ultimately incompatible for Colin, who earnestly loves to serve but also earnestly loves to love. He needs not just an “arrangement” but a relationship alongside it. “I’m so happy, but I could be happier,” Colin says when he asks if Ray would be open to introducing one non-dynamic day a week. Ray acts as if he will not offer this, but one wonders more so if he just cannot — if he has created a protective husk that can only be maintained through sterile and specific arrangements.
But while Ray and Colin’s relationship ultimately fractures, the submissive dynamic that Colin becomes attached to (and continues to pursue outside of Ray) is a gift bestowed by Ray. It liberates Colin.
We are sensitive people, socialized in worlds where power structures create endless rules and regulations, and where we are subject to endless structural and interpersonal judgment and limitations regarding our bodies, minds, and desires. It can take very little to feel very vulnerable or very powerful. It can take little to feel like you’ve come undone. It’s scary and it’s exhilarating. I love a fantasy; I even love, when explored lovingly or with actual curiosity, a red room. But most of all, I love to think that we can be unhitched from our own racing mind or internal chatter by sitting at someone’s feet because they said so. Pillion’s ending — Colin, still a little heartbroken, but searching for someone to meet his needs — doesn’t break my heart so much as crack it open. How wonderful it is to allow yourself to be changed, to allow yourself to be overcome by the vulnerability of something like submission.
