Of the three motion pictures releasing in 2025 that share the title Good Boy, director Jan Komasa’s could be the strangest. Anson Boon stars as Tommy, a 19-year-old who spends nights out harassing strangers, utilizing bus stops as loos, and ingesting as many medicine as he probably can. Throughout the fateful night time that kicks off the movie, Tommy is snatched off the streets, the digital camera crashing in the direction of him as he stumbles drunkenly residence.
When he wakes up, Tommy finds himself with a thick steel collar hooked up by chain to the ceiling of a dingy basement within the British countryside. At this level, Good Boy may go in numerous instructions, and it flirts with style as usually as Tommy flirts with women on the golf equipment he frequents. What’s most shocking about this movie, although, is its insistence on not being one factor, shifting between home drama and kidnap thriller.
Good Boy Is A Slippery & Irritating Thriller
Tommy’s kidnapper, Chris (Stephen Graham in a chillingly affable function), is the patriarch of a fractured household, his spouse Katherine (Andrea Riseborough) virtually catatonic, as pale as a ghost haunting the nation manor they reside in. Their son Jonathan (Equipment Rakusen) is creepily cheerful, his response to Tommy’s presence solely including to the surrealism of the scenario.
Their objective in kidnapping Tommy appears to be two-pronged: they want to rehabilitate him, however they’re additionally hoping to rebuild a household dynamic that has been misplaced. In fact, this all hinges on Tommy’s cooperation — whether or not he even desires to be a greater particular person stays an open query all through a lot of Good Boy.
Chris usually forces Tommy to observe previous movies of himself the place he steals automobiles and torments strangers, verbally and bodily abusing individuals for no different cause than the truth that they have been round. Good Boy is frustratingly elusive, although, avoiding rationalization for a lot of of its mysteries and treading too evenly relating to thematic issues. We do not discover out why Chris has been stalking Tommy for seemingly fairly a while, nor do we actually perceive who Tommy is.
There are imprecise gestures in the direction of an absent father and an uncaring mom, however Good Boy does not attempt to over-explain Tommy’s dangerous habits. Generally individuals are simply dangerous. That does not imply they are not able to change, however usually, excessive circumstances power them to reckon with the change they have been avoiding. All-time low can appear to be lots of issues and, for Tommy, it looks like he is virtually there even earlier than he is kidnapped.
However, it seems that Tommy’s all-time low is definitely the basement of a well-meaning, however psychotic man in an unconvincing wig. When Good Boy lastly decides to wrestle with the concepts at its core, it touches on them solely briefly. In a manner, Chris and Katherine are offering the whole lot Tommy seems to lack — security and safety, love and tenderness. However when this stuff are being compelled upon you, does it actually matter?
And, with Good Boy solely nodding in the direction of these concepts and the depth of those characters, their efforts ring hole. Rounding out these dynamics is Rina (Monika Frajczyk), a employed housekeeper and undocumented immigrant from Macedonia whose sole function within the movie appears to be to supply Tommy with a key piece of knowledge within the third act. It is a confounding component that solely provides a way of confusion to Good Boy, placing into stark query its final targets.
There may be hardly sufficient room in Good Boy for a meditation on the state of immigration in the UK, not to mention the remainder of the concepts the movie is wrestling with. Fortunately, Boon, Graham, and Riseborough do sufficient to anchor the movie and convey it residence because it lands on a unusually poignant be aware each chilling and endearing.
Good Boy premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant.
Good Boy
6/10
- Director
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Jan Komasa
- Writers
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Naqqash Khalid
- Producers
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Ewa Piaskowska