Good Boy is a heart-warming tale about an oddball family reeling from a terrible loss that attempts to heal by taking in a wayward boy and working together to rehabilitate him. It’s also a heart-stopping thriller following a young man who wakes up from a wild night out chained up in the basement of a remote country estate inhabited by an incredibly messed up bunch of people. In Jan Komasa’s new film, both stories are happening simultaneously, with disconcerting effect.
(As a side note, this is not the other 2025 horror film named Good Boy, which tells a ghost story from the perspective of a dog. Two chillers with the same name out in the same period isn’t a lot, but it is weird it happened twice. This one isn’t a tale of the supernatural, but there are ghosts of the past, sinister silver hand bells and warnings to never open the gate.)
The film cold opens on Tommy (Anson Boon), an angel-faced utter toe-rag out for a night on the town, where he pops pills, snorts chunky lines, fights a bouncer, shags around, masturbates in a sink, and liberally coats the pavements in piss and vomit. He appears to be the very opposite of a good boy. But as he staggers into the night, someone is hunting him down.
Cut to Rina (Monika Frajczyk) a young woman from Macedonia who has been hired for a cleaning job at a grand house down a long driveway where things are distinctly off from the jump. Her disconcerting new employer Chris (Stephen Graham) scans her with a security wand, locks her phone in a safe, and reminds her she’s signed a non-disclosure agreement.
After introducing her to his adorable 10-year-old son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), aka Sunshine, and his strange and reclusive wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) or, as he calls her, Princess, it’s time for a tour of the cellar. Where she finds Tommy, collared and chained to the ceiling.
Rina is no dope and, recognising this horror movie set-up for what it is, attempts to quit on the spot. Only Chris has run a little background check and discovered her immigration status is in question, politely blackmailing her into colluding in this insane setup. The modern day gothic manor’s cast is assembled for a wild ride into unorthodox detox methods and the meaning of found family. Or should that be bound-in-a-basement family?
It’s a sick premise that only gets sicker, but sometimes sickness in the cure. Good Boy is tonally unique, but there are shades of Phantom Thread here — only with familial instead of romantic love gone sideways.
The cast of Good Boy give career best-performances and have electric chemistry. Graham, fresh off his Emmy’s sweep with Adolescence, is almost unrecognisable as a seemingly meek and mild weirdo in a toupee that conceals a bottomless capacity for violence and home renovations. Riseborough is spellbinding as a grieving mother who comes alive when teaching hard lessons, and Rakusen is full of Enid Blyton levels of cheer (you can see why his previous roles include Dick in The Famous Five) despite the gloom of his childhood home. As Rina, Frajczyk is utterly believable, if a little underused as an audience cypher.
Boon (whom you may recognise from Mob Land, where he plays another violent reprobate) makes a fascinating study of a young man who is initially so repellent that you’re almost glad he’s shackled to the masonry, forced to piss in a bottle and watch his past acts of livestreamed ultra-violence on TV. Good Boy is A Clockwork Orange by way of Misery, Pygmalion with stun guns and a telescopic baton. Tommy has been a very bad boy, but if he learns to behave well and read (to his initial disgust) books, he can gain privileges. But the collar stays on.
I suspect that everyone will interpret Good Boy through their own prism of reference and family relations. For me, it turns on a meta moment where Jonathan invites Tommy up for a family movie night, complete with popcorn and chains. Watching Kes for the first time, Tommy is bought to tears by Ken Loach’s tale of a working-class boy with no prospects attempting to tame and train a wild thing. “I think I’ve had enough now,” he mumbles. “Take me back down.” But his captors are a family that have a hard time letting go, and Kathryn in particular wants her boys tied to her with an umbilical chord of metal links.
There are many stand-out moments that had the audience in fits of nervous laughter that are too good to spoil. You never know which way a scene will turn, towards charm or squirmy fear. Komasa blessedly doesn’t feel the need to explain everything to the audience either, trusting you to pick up the hints of past events that bought each character to this moment without smothering you in exposition like a rag soaked in chloroform.
Good Boy premiered at the BFI London Film Festival
