Pillion vs the book: both endings make Ray disappear, only one lets Colin know why
Box Hill ends with Colin learning Ray is gone for good. Pillion ends with Colin learning nothing at all, and the director says he doesn't want to know either.
Harry Lighton's Pillion is adapted from Adam Mars-Jones's 2020 novella Box Hill, and the author himself doesn't call it a faithful adaptation. The film won the screenplay prize in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section in May 2025, Best British Independent Film at the BIFAs and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Gothams, then turned a reported $1 million budget into $6.6 million at the box office. A24 released it in the US on February 6, 2026.
"I think it's more of a transformation than an adaptation."
— Adam Mars-Jones, author of Box Hill, to Publishers Weekly
Lighton agrees. Asked how faithful he'd been to the book, he told A Rabbit's Foot: "Not faithful. But the DNA of the book is there." The biggest difference is in the last act.
How Box Hill ends
The novella is set in 1975. Colin is 18 when he meets Ray, a biker about a decade older, at Box Hill near Dorking, a Sunday spot for motorcyclists. Colin becomes Ray's submissive and stays for more than six years, without ever learning Ray's job, his birthday or whether "Ray" is even his real name.
When Colin is 24, he comes back from a family holiday to find out Ray has been killed in a bike accident. Ray had made his friends promise to keep his burial place secret, and they do. The book ends with Colin still unsure what really happened.
So Colin gets a reason, and it's the bluntest one available: Ray is dead. What he never gets is anything else, not a grave and not an explanation from the man himself.
How Pillion ends
Lighton keeps Ray alive and takes away the reason.
After Colin's mother dies, Colin (Harry Melling) burns his hands while cooking, and Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) lets him sleep in the bed for the first time. Colin says he loves him. Ray answers that love isn't what their relationship is built on and refuses Colin's request for a regular day off from the dynamic. They fight, and Colin takes off on Ray's motorbike.
The next morning, Ray agrees to one day off. They go to the cinema, eat at a restaurant and wrestle in a park, where they kiss for the first time. Colin catches a sad look on Ray's face afterward. The next day, Ray is gone, and no amount of searching turns him up.
The film's last scene skips ahead. Colin, now clearer about his limits, sets up a Grindr profile, meets a new dom named Darren (Anthony Welsh) at a sports pitch, and the two start negotiating the terms of their arrangement.
In Box Hill, Ray's friends keep a secret for a dead man. In Pillion, Ray keeps it himself, and Colin's answer is to write better terms the next time.
Why Lighton changed it
Mars-Jones put the headline difference plainly to Publishers Weekly: "Ray doesn't die in the script." Lighton hasn't offered a tidy reason for the disappearance. He told The Playlist he isn't going to give away the film's secret, because he doesn't want to know it either.
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What he has explained is how he thinks about Ray's secrecy. He told Vanyaland he was less interested in the homophobia of 1970s Britain as an explanation for Ray's mystery and "more interested in Ray's mystery being the possibility that it was just part of an erotic game." Read that way, leaving without a word is the last move in the game.
What else the film changed
The ending isn't the only thing Lighton moved. Most of the other changes come with his reasons attached:
- The era: The film is set in present-day Bromley instead of 1975. Lighton told Publishers Weekly that decision "was born of a budget choice," and that it also let him put more of himself into the story and ask new questions about queer parenthood.
- Colin's age: The book's Colin is a sexually inexperienced 18-year-old. The film's Colin, Mars-Jones noted, is 35, works as a parking enforcement officer, lives with his parents and sings in a barbershop quartet. Lighton told Sight and Sound the barbershop came from looking for the opposite of an S&M bike gang.
- The parents: In the book, Colin's parents stay out of his love life. Lighton told Vanyaland he was "slightly bored" with the homophobic-parent trope, so the film's parents start out accepting and only push back when Colin's partner doesn't fit their idea of a good boyfriend. He also gave Colin's mother, Peggy (Lesley Sharp), a terminal illness, a fight with Ray over dinner and a funeral. The book's parents don't interfere at all.
- The first encounter: The novella describes Colin and Ray's first sexual encounters as rape. Lighton said he "didn't want it to be categorically abusive," so audiences could stay invested in the relationship.
- The day off: The cinema, the restaurant, the wrestling match and the kiss are all Lighton's. They're the film's biggest tonal swing away from the book, and the thing that comes right before Ray leaves.
- The bikers: Lighton brought in members of the real Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, who appear as themselves and advised on the film, and wrote real-life "human pup" Paul Tallis's persona into Ray's crew.
The book's Colin spends six years with a man who tells him nothing and then loses him to a road accident. The film's Colin gets one ordinary day with Ray, and that day seems to be what ends it. Lighton turned a story about losing someone into a story about being left, and then wouldn't say why Ray goes.
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