Good Boy slinks in like a midnight movie and then bares its teeth. Starring Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, this English thriller amps up the language of “tough love” into a full-blown captivity experiment, splicing pulp shocks with a cool, clinical gaze. The result is an incredibly bitter, spikily and darkly funny fable about control and complicity, and the stories that parents tell themselves to justify the unjustifiable.
A captivity parable, unconventionally
In the cause of truth-telling, I’ll throw up a stop sign before I get this plot reveal chugging forward: On a remote rural compound with an ingrown population whose only approval is one another’s, ex-cop Chris (Graham) presides over and works to cover up horrors; his brittle, watchful wife Kathryn (Riseborough), who believes what she does makes it okay or at least necessary — commands a household that isn’t but plays at domestic bliss: She keeps her floor-to-ceiling-windowed kitchen neat as button-threads, worries in hushed whispers over a young boy no one seems to call by his own name, known so far only as “Sunshine,” acknowledges no built-in debris except their live-in cleaner — if you don’t count the chained teenager they’ve hidden in the basement.
That teenager, Tommy (Anson Boon), is a strutting social-media showboat whose evenings of mayhem and viral swaggering offer plenty of opportunities for Chris’s homebrewed “treatment.” What starts as a stern lecture becomes a chain reaction of manners, compliance and injury.
The Polish director Jan Komasa, whose Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi told its own story of stolen identity and whose biting internet-age thriller The Hater skewered paranoid politics in the time of Facebook, guides the proceedings with a cool, almost antiseptic precision. The cleaning lady, Rina (Monika Frajczyk), an immigrant trapped with few choices, serves as our point-of-view; the first to clock the flashing red warnings and the last to have any means of doing something in response. As with Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In,” medicalized order and moral rot are close to each other, and the friction between them is what propels the movie’s queasy momentum.
Strains that make the walls hum
Graham, an actor of simmering tenderness (Time, Boiling Point, This Is England), is perfectly cast. His Chris is a guy who goes the way of carrot over stick, until worryingly deep into the game when stick feels like mercy. He’s the sort of dad who gleefully writes etiquette videos for his son — and keeps a working stun gun just out of frame. You can see the violence in his body, how it resides even in his posture, the way he cushions his voice before it cracks.
Riseborough, always a shapeshifter (To Leslie, Possessor), holds Kathryn’s fey arc: she begins as a wisp in silk nightgowns who looks out of windows as though they’re mirrors and corrugates into someone freshened by the family’s carnal plan. It’s a thaw more than a transformation, and it is chilling to behold.
Boon, on the other hand — so corkscrewed and sharp as Pistol — plays Tommy ferally calculated. His eyes, even as the leash is loosened, broadcast a brain in which exits are being mapped while mayhem is rehearsed. He’s repugnant and fascinating, a mess of masquite folding in on itself as survival mechanism.
Style: a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes
And Komasa maintains the palette: pressed denim, unsmeared glasses, counters that shine. It is a visual joke with a blade — an aspirational catalog of middle-class order supported by a dungeon. Production design tips toward caricature without overblowing the gag; a touch more stylized hauteur might have better paved the way for the film’s audacious final switches. As it is, the ending hits with a true jolt but can feel a little under-supported by what has been a somewhat restrained aesthetic coming up to it.
The humor is tar-black. But much of it is also down to the absurdity of the ‘curriculum’ which Chris imposes home videos about good behavior watched by a captive audience – and also to Tommy’s insistence on not being some tidy case study. Its humor isn’t the ha-ha variety, it’s more the kind that makes you look toward the exit and arrange to sit closer to an aisle.
Parenting, punishment and the algorithm
Good Boy weaponizes a very contemporary anxiety: that social media draws the worst out of our kids, and the old guardrails have broken off. Ofcom recently reported that most teenagers are watching short-form video daily and being exposed to risky trends; UNICEF has for years noted how young people’s online lives both magnify opportunity and harm. Komasa doesn’t lecture the platforms, but he does articulate how a parent’s terror of the feed can transform into a wish to script a child’s life — right down to body language, smile, self.
There’s also a shrewd instinct for how viewers metabolize on-screen jeopardy. “There is a belief that many children become involved in sexual relations or induce others to do so simply through fear of violence to which they are exposed. Komasa leans on that psychology, allowing implication and power dynamics to do as much work as the jolts.
Verdict: a late-night growler with bite
As genre work, Good Boy is carefully constructed: lean and mean, occasionally hilarious in that way that makes you hate yourself for laughing. As a morality tale, it’s messier — that is to say, more honest — asserting that “parenting” can be a euphemism for dominion and that the line between care and control is easier to cross than it is to redraw. A little more visual bravado toward the end may have been what could have made its finale feel inevitable rather than audacious, but Graham and Riseborough maintain the film’s steady pulse between its white-knuckled turns.
Unfolding at a major festival that tends to push provocations alongside prestige crowd-pleasers, Komasa’s latest feels tailor-made for late-night discussion. It’s not going to help anyone feel better about youth, tech or family, but it is the sort of story you share with the lights on and the basement door locked.