‘Good Boy’ review: Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough anchor off-kilter morality tale

Dir: Jan Komasa. Poland/UK. 2025. 110mins

The imposing home within the English countryside hides a darkish secret, as so a lot of them do; right here, there’s a terrified 19-year-old lad imprisoned within the cellar, chained like a canine with a steel collar spherical his neck. From this acquainted style set-up, Good Boy, from Polish director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi, Suicide Room), regularly reveals itself to be an entertainingly off-kilter story of rage, rehabilitation and redemption, its often-outlandish twists and turns grounded by sturdy performances from Stephen Graham, Anson Boon and Andrea Riseborough.

Intentionally odd, carefully-calibrated neo-gothic fable

Having premiered in Toronto, Good Boy will subsequent transfer to London and will entice consideration for each its solid – notably Graham, driving excessive on the success of Netflix worldwide hit collection Adolescence – and its intriguing premise. Theatrical play definitely isn’t out of the query, and it might entice audiences on the lookout for sensible psychological horror, though streaming could show the higher match for a movie that might generate stable phrase of mouth. The presence of Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (EO) as a producer might also pique additional curiosity.

Tommy (Boon, a former Display Star Of Tomorrow) could be very undoubtedly not a superb boy. He spends his days tormenting youngsters and crashing vehicles within the identify of social media content material, and his nights on drugs- and alcohol-fuelled benders. It’s after one in all these that he’s all of the sudden bundled into an nameless automobile; when he wakes he’s in a basement, chained to the wall. Quickly he meets Chris (Graham), who lives within the house together with his spouse Cathy (Riseborough) and younger son Jonathan (Package Rakusen). Softly spoken and seemingly mild-mannered, Chris doesn’t appear to be a psychopath, however nonetheless tells Tommy that he can’t go away. It turns into clear that this household are decided to make Tommy see the error of his methods by any means needed.

Polish director Komasa is adept at telling tales of households and communities as locations of each security and suffocation, and he handles this narrative, from screenwriters Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, with confidence, model and greater than just a little black humour. Initially meant to be set in Warsaw (the place the movie’s interiors have been shot), a transfer to Yorkshire brings with it a suitably imposing nation property and the huge open areas of the encompassing moors, which cinematographer Michel Dymek drinks in on the few events Tommy is ready to enterprise outdoors.

He spends most of his time imprisoned this lavish nation pile, round which the pale, taciturn Cathy wafts like a spectre, the bubbly Jonathan – nicknamed Sunshine by his mother and father – tries just a little too arduous to please and edgy Macedonian housekeeper Rina (Monika Frajczyk) makes an attempt to not give in to Tommy’s flirtations. Within the basement, Tommy is compelled to take heed to anger administration tapes, watch social media movies of his misdeeds. When he transgresses – makes use of foul language, refuses to apologise – he’s punished. Initially defiant and unresponsive, Tommy regularly appears to begin coming spherical; later, as a reward for his good behaviour, Chris builds a monitor and pulley system so {that a} still-chained Tommy can have full entry to the home.

That is an train in psychology quite than out-and-out horror – there’s hardly any violence, though the specter of it’s ever-present – and viewers are invited to attract their very own conclusions. Chris and Cathy’s motivations stay ambiguous; there are hints of grief over a former inhabitant of the home, options that they’ve accomplished this earlier than. Tommy is, admittedly, one thing of a cipher for disaffected, delinquent, entitled youth (Chris, considerably paradoxically, admonishes Tommy’s complete era for at all times ’enjoying the sufferer’), and there may be some sympathy for many who would try to show him into a greater man, even when the strategies are past the pale.

Whereas the narrative is indirect in locations, the performances are nailed down. Boon is stuffed with swagger and fury as Tommy, who’s used to coasting via life on his bravado and edgy attraction, however exhibits hints of vulnerability beneath that belligerent floor. The movie asks us to consider what sort of life he will need to have that that Chris and Cathy’s unconventional care and affection begins to really feel interesting. 

Riseborough is commandingly enigmatic because the deeply troubled Cathy – given the setting, the Wuthering Heights hyperlink is clear if not overstated – who needs nothing greater than to take Tommy beneath her personal damaged wing, but has moments of horrible, quiet cruelty. Graham performs Chris as a wolf in sheep’s clothes, a loving man who needs to make his household glad however whose controlling streak usually will get the higher of him.

There’s little question that Good Boy begins to expire of steam by movie’s finish; Rina’s storyline ends quite randomly and abruptly, whereas the movie’s ultimate scenes threaten to push an already fantastical premise into the absurd. But there’s one thing deeply compelling about this intentionally odd, carefully-calibrated neo-gothic fable, which means that rehabilitation might be discovered within the darkest of locations, and that true freedom is solely a matter of belief.