Director: Jan Komasa
Stars: Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Anson Boon
Jan Komasa’s film has an identity crisis. Seeing as 2025 also generated a creative indie horror from a canine perspective named Good Boy, as well as a notable South Korean miniseries of the same name about Olympians turned state-sanctioned vigilantes, the Polish filmmakers part-boiled British thriller Good Boy has gone through two changes of identity. For promotional purposes and for the BBFC it has gotten the definitive moniker The Good Boy, while for some territories (and on Letterboxd) it now goes by Heel. It’s an unfortunately shambolic state of affairs for the file, which is struggling to assert a singular identity, but it’s also fairly fitting given what’s lurking within.
Tommy (a fully-committed Anson Boon) is your typical young menace to society, presented to us from the outset as just another of the UK’s drunk and drugged up miscreants staggering about the city streets by night, wandering from club to club and pissing in bus shelters. This antisocial behaviour warrants his kidnapping by Stephen Graham’s independently wealthy, buttoned-down Chris, who whisks Tommy away to his gated family home in the countryside. Tommy awakes shackled in the cellar, where Chris seems intent on reforming the lad through a strict routine of old PSA movies and a tape of birdsong. The feral young man spits graphic threats at his captor while upstairs lurk Chris’ evidently depressed wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their endlessly creepy home-schooled son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen).
Largely it’s the character work that’s worth the price of admission on this one. Boon inhabits Tommy with a convincing, menacing energy (at least until he’s quickly domesticated), while Riseborough’s withering Kathryn is a library of untold stories. Graham does an uncanny impersonation of Reece Shearsmith here, and his character even has an inexplicable toupee that helps him look the part. So much so that one is moved to wonder why they didn’t just cast Shearsmith in the first place. Maybe he said no.
Class and its disparate associated mannerisms are at the core of The Good Boy, albeit in a polemic, deeply unflattering and condescending manner. Tommy’s gradual transformation from mindlessly aggressive yob to carefully mannered citizen is charted through the coded adjustments to his appearance. His bare arms sport tattoos, but a nice shirt covers those up. A pair of miraculously un-prescribed glasses reshape his face to match the newly literate character that Chris and Kathryn start molding him into.
But the process as depicted here is far too easy. Chris mainly leaves Tommy in front of a television and uses that to reform him, making the film feel like an advocate for absentee parenting. More uncomfortable is the direct argument that torture and corporal punishment work as methods of rehabilitation. The Good Boy sees nothing wrong with these tactics, and chides Tommy’s generation for hiding behind victimhood. Needless to say, if you’re interested in a nuanced look at the challenges of social reform, you won’t find it here. Throughout there’s the gnawing sense that Chris is underestimating his captive, but Komasa hasn’t done enough to convince us that the boy’s been changed, nor fallen prey to Stockholm syndrome. Tommy’s whole MO is violent, unplanned outbreaks. He even has a social media channel promoting them. And there are plenty of opportunities for him to lash out once his leash is given some slack. Conveniently, nobody is looking for him because he’s an unloved product of society, and the police aren’t interested in him. But we’re shown online evidence of a following for documented crimes which Chris even takes the time to list. It’s contradictory.
The inclusion of Monika Frajczyk’s Macedonian maid Rina further confuses things. She’s tacit to the weird goings on in the home of her employers because they hold her citizenship over her head, alluding to a past in sex work that she ought to be ashamed of. This sputters out in an unfulfilling anticlimax that reveals she’s fleeing her family – a broadly-drawn set of mafioso types – leaving the suggestion that family is where you find it. This more romantic and hackneyed notion is mirrored in Tommy’s story, pushed toward us as the take-home message. But all of the film’s families are broken, and Chris’ household isn’t just a family; it’s clearly a metaphoric placeholder from the state. Concluding that you ought to trust its abusive methods because you’ve been indoctrinated and that this is good in the long-run is troublingly conservative, even tantamount to propaganda.
Unless you’re politically inclined to vote Reform, this one’s likely to disappoint. Like Tommy it’s probably heard of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, but skipped reading it at school so didn’t realise it’s a satire and not a mandate.
Not such a good boy, then.
The Lost Highway Hotel 