DIRECTED by Jan Komasa, The Good Boy, also known as Heel, is a twisted psychological thriller starring Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough about a delinquent teenager and his creepy adoptive family.
With moments of black-comedy and increasing oddball tension throughout, Komasa provides an unconventional solution to dealing with violent young thugs who proudly display their criminal escapades all over social media.
The film opens with 19-year-old delinquent Tommy (Anson Boon), a volatile youth out clubbing with his friends, whose moral compass is on the floor. Taking drugs like they’re smarties, and so inebriated that he can barely stand, this rebel without a clue is quick to violence and has no self-esteem. We see him in one early scene urinating at a bus stop, with his eyes bulging out of his head, as a startled young woman looks on in fear.
However, Tommy’s days of peeing in public, bullying school kids, mindless vandalism and stealing cars are all but over. When he wakes up the next morning, the headache tearing through his skull is the least of his worries.
Tommy finds himself chained by the neck in the basement of devoted family man Chris (Graham), who has been following the young tearaway’s rowdy behaviour online with much interest. The head of a maladjusted household, Christ believes that Tommy just needs some tough love to put him back on the straight and narrow.
Together with his ghostly and deeply unnerving wife Kathryn (Riseborough), Tommy quickly discovers that the only way he is going to survive their unorthodox rehabilitation unscathed is by being a “good boy” and playing along with this disturbed game of happy families.
Komasa’s film is an intriguing watch, with Boon giving a powerhouse performance as the disturbed teenager. It’s biggest flaw, however, is the loose threads, of which there are many, that are left dangling. There are too many unanswered questions about why this warped family, with their big country home, are carrying out such macabre reformation on wayward adolescents.
That said, The Good Boy is intense and unpredictable enough to keep us glued to our seats right up until our nail-biting sentence has been served.
(4/5)