Pillion

Harry Lighton's Pillion premiered in Un Certain Regard at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where Lighton — adapting the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones — won the section's Best Screenplay award. It went on to win Best British Independent Film at the BIFAs in November, plus three further BIFA prizes for screenplay, costume and hair-and-make-up; Best Adapted Screenplay at the Gotham Awards; and Film of the Year at the London Film Critics' Circle. The film carries a 100% Tomatometer score across its release window and was widely placed in 2025 critics' year-end lists. It is Lighton's first feature after several Bafta-nominated shorts.

The film is anchored by Harry Melling's performance as Colin, the shy traffic warden whose life is interrupted by the arrival of Alexander Skarsgård's Ray. Skarsgård's reading of Ray (unhurried, watchful, very physically still) was the breakout performance of his year and earned him the Stockholm Achievement Award. The supporting cast — Douglas Hodge and Lesley Sharp as Colin's parents, Anthony Welsh, Jake Shears — gives the film an ensemble texture rare for a romance built around two leads. Lighton shoots the BDSM scenes with notable matter-of-factness and the comic scenes with even more, refusing both the queer-trauma register and the prestige sex-as-spectacle register that have shaped most recent serious cinema in the space.

The film's reception placed it alongside God's Own Country (2017) and All of Us Strangers (2023) as part of a new British queer cinema interested in patience, ordinary tenderness and the texture of working-class English life. Lighton has said in interviews that the central question of the film, for him, was how to make a film about a kink relationship that took the relationship seriously as a relationship — i.e., as a thing two people are doing together, not a metaphor for something else.