I Hated Pillion. Here’s Why.

Spoilers ahead.

There’s a kind of movie that arrives like a leather jacket at the back of a diner. It looks cool from a distance, smells faintly of danger, and makes you wonder if you should sit at that table. Pillion is that jacket. It’s stylish. It’s loud when it wants to be loud. It poses as fearless. But scratch the surface and you realize the lining’s been glued in a hurry.

On paper, the premise is deliciously simple and provocative: an awkward, inexperienced young man thrown into the deep end of a dom-sub relationship with a charismatic, older biker. It’s adapted from a novel, a literary pedigree meant to signal nuance, not just spectacle. The director leans into art-house textures: soft rooms, hard leather, a soundtrack that wants to make you feel something incandescent and forbidden. That shimmer is the bait. But bait doesn’t always feed you.

Here’s my problem with the film. This will sound like an argument people have been having in too many late-night threads and comment sections: Pillion confuses intensity with integrity. It mistakes the adrenaline of domination for an argument, as if emotional brutality is a valid plot engine. That’s a seductive lie. Pain is dramatic, sure, but presenting abuse as character development without the messy, necessary labor of showing consent, negotiation, and repair is like serving a raw oyster and calling it dinner. You taste salt, and you taste rot.

There’s a long history of mainstream art confusing kink with cruelty, and a lot of the backlash comes from that tired shortcut. Some reviewers, including voices from kink communities, praise the film for dragging leather culture out of the basement and into the light, for giving queer biker culture a cinematic pulse. That’s not nothing. Representation matters. Pillion does foreground a subculture that rarely makes it to the screen. But representation is slippery. You can put a marginalized life on camera and still reduce it to spectacle. Outlets like The Guardian have rounded up kink-community voices who applaud its rawness and historical nods, but even they acknowledge that what the film shows is not the whole truth. It’s a slice, sometimes a sliver dressed up as the whole pie.

Spend five minutes on Reddit and you’ll see where the pedantry meets the hurt. Some viewers felt seen. Others felt flattened. A recurring critique is that Colin, the young protagonist, is robbed of agency so the emotional payoff never feels earned. He becomes a vessel for someone else’s mythology. That’s not nitpicking. It’s frustration with the film’s willingness to let cruelty stand in for complexity.

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice the collar around Colin later in the film, and Ray wearing the key. I’m not deeply embedded in kink communities, but as a sex educator I know that symbols like a lock and key carry weight. A collar is often the kink equivalent of an engagement ring. It signals safety, trust, care, and protection. The film treats it like set dressing. So when Ray abandons him, we’re meant to shrug and move on. Putting that collar in context makes the abandonment hit harder. Being ghosted when things get too real is, ironically, the most emotionally accurate part of the film for me. I’ve been there. That feeling lands. What doesn’t land is the lack of accountability. Colin and Ray made a promise, and Ray walking away without consequence leaves a sour knot in your stomach.

Ray is manipulative. He’s controlling. He withholds affection like currency. He knows exactly how much power he has and uses it without apology. At least he doesn’t pretend otherwise. He doesn’t cloak himself in therapeutic language or perform softness as cover. He’s not a wolf in a feminist cardigan. He’s just a wolf. In a strange way, that’s the film’s most honest move.

The issue isn’t that Ray is abusive. The issue is that the narrative frames his abuse like a complicated love language instead of harm. We’re invited to sit in the ambiguity, to wonder whether this is “just their dynamic.” The camera lingers as if it wants us seduced by the damage. There’s a difference between portraying a toxic relationship and glamorizing one. Pillion insists it’s doing the former while flirting with the latter.

Many reviews call the film emotionally resonant. There’s also a quieter refrain that the story feels thin beneath the sheen. Do we understand why these characters make the choices they do, beyond “this is their world”? Strong storytelling links cause and consequence so you feel the weight of every decision. Weaker storytelling leans on mood to paper over gaps. Too often, Pillion chooses mood. It’s like being served an expensive plate that’s mostly foam and a sprinkle of salt. It photographs beautifully. It leaves you hungry.

There’s also the question of audience. The film seems to court two crowds: the kink-curious and the art-house aesthetes. The first group wants accuracy, context, and a clear anatomy of how consent is negotiated and safety is built. The second wants mood, metaphor, and moral ambiguity. Pillion tries to satisfy both and, in places, satisfies neither. Stories about unequal power dynamics owe the audience clarity about what’s consensual theater and what’s abuse dressed up in leather. Too often, the film winks instead of clarifies.

When queer stories narrow themselves to a single trope, especially one as fraught as domination and submission, they risk flattening an entire community. Queer love is messy, miraculous, banal, horny, tender. It’s also political and social, sometimes even spiritual. Compressing all of that into “queer equals kink” is reductive. It feeds fantasies for straight audiences who think they’re being edgy while erasing the breadth of queer attachment. If a film insists on being provocative, it also has to work harder to be truthful. Otherwise, it’s just noise.

That said, I’m not tossing the jacket in the dumpster. The performances have flashes where the camera stops preening and lets two frightened, very human people collide. Some scenes land with the quiet force of confession. This is not a film without merit. But merit doesn’t cancel responsibility. We can admire craft and still name the failures.

If you leave Pillion unsettled, that makes sense. If you leave thrilled by its aesthetics and convinced it’s a nuanced study of kink, that makes sense too. What frustrates me is the idea that mood equals moral depth. You can make something gorgeous and still avoid the hard work of ethical storytelling.

Movies, at their best, are laboratories for empathy. They show us lives we don’t lead and invite us to understand them. Pillion sometimes feels like a lab where someone lit the Bunsen burner and forgot the gloves. It’s noisy. It’s occasionally brave. And it often mistakes intensity for consequence.

Final thought: give me messy. Give me dangerous. Give me wrong-headed, if the film earns it. Pillion earns some of the mess and the danger. It doesn’t earn the rest. For all its leather and light, it never quite becomes the movie it wants to be. It’s beautifully plated, but it forgets to feed you.