Coarse corrections: "The Good Boy/Heel"

The latest filmmaker to migrate from the arthouse fringes to the English-language commercial cinema is the Pole Jan Komasa, whose impressive Corpus Christi was Oscar-nominated back in 2020. That film was a clerical drama with a slowburning thriller element (would our fake priest hero be defrocked before completing his good works?). The new film - marketed here in the UK as The Good Boy, but credited as Good Boy on screen and being released in the US as Heel, for extra confusion - is genre up until the point it isn't. In some way, it presents as a companion piece (or corrective) to its leading man's recent TV success Adolescence: what Komasa's film wonders is what would happen if a character played by Stephen Graham took extreme measures to prevent a kid from going murderously off the rails. The kid is Tommy (Anson Boon, from streaming telly's Mobland), a swaggering young alpha - chains round his neck, wrap of blow in his Chinos - who's introduced mid-Saturday night tear-up (scrapping, shagging, pissing up the bus shelter) before being snatched off the street by persons unknown. Cut to: Chris and Kathryn (Graham and Andrea Riseborough), a pair of neatfreaks bringing up a ten-year-old (Kit Rakusen) in a remote country house. Chris is first seen interviewing a Macedonian cleaner (Monica Frajczyk), 2026's first Character Who Doesn't Know What She's Getting Into (And Who Should, Really, Be Running Off In The Exact Opposite Direction). Doubly so after Chris, giving his new employee the grand tour, reveals Tommy chained up in the basement, the couple having taken him in and on as a perverse pet project. Weird as it may sound, we're not so far removed from Corpus Christi. The central clash is again that between orthodoxy and restless youth; for a symbolic dog collar, Komasa now swaps in an actual dog collar, slipped around Tommy's neck on a chain bolted to the cellar wall.

The Good Boy is a smaller and dingier endeavour, though - it's not going to be nominated for awards - and there are things Komasa misses that a local director would surely have spotted and fixed. British viewers are likely to spend the film's opening reels marvelling (and maybe chuckling) at how much effort has been expended to remove Stephen Graham of his essential Stephen Grahamness. With his suburban accent, Dennis Nilsen specs, limp hairpiece and persistent air of prissiness, Chris is a role crying out for Reece Shearsmith, albeit in a world where Reece Shearsmith's name secured international distribution deals and sold cinema tickets. The Good Boy could easily be mistaken for a feature-length episode of Psychoville or Inside No. 9: its early exchanges (one location, low-lit sets, small knot of players) suggest a self-contained sitcom that has started to break bad. Patches of darkly funny writing follow, as when Tommy is allowed upstairs to watch Kes ("as if I weren't depressed enough, living in a basement"). Yet much as Chris and Kathryn gradually afford their captive greater roaming range, so too these characters offer the actors more wiggle room than first thought. A sly midsection, benefitting from a day or so's shooting on the Yorkshire Moors, expands the film's scope while also suggesting just how quickly Fritzl-like behaviour can become normalised. I'm less sure about the film's closing movement, which struck me as an obvious misstep: setting the thriller aspects to one side for an extended coda, Komasa finally appears to side with the conservatism Chris and Kathryn represent. Maybe the idea was to reflect the general direction of travel in a Britain busy limiting access to porn and social media (or, indeed, in a Poland that has of late taken a similar lurch rightwards), but it feels instinctively wrong for this story: I wondered whether the two separately credited writers disagreed at some stage about where exactly these characters should land. Still, overseas directors have made far less auspicious debuts on British soil, and The Good Boy might well serve as a teachable example of what a film gains from having good actors commit to silly, vaguely disreputable material: Riseborough, in particular, works spooky wonders with a depressed-ghoul character who can't have registered as all that much on the page.

The Good Boy is now playing in selected cinemas.