There’s something truly chilling about how “Good Boy” plays its horror so straight. Everything disturbing is presented with such eerie calm by the characters involved that you begin to question whether you’re the one who’s missing something. The trick of director Jan Komasa’s beautifully warped and quietly devastating film is that it buries you in the unsettling without ever raising its voice.
The strange story unfolds like a twisted modern fairy tale that never bothers to explain the rules. When a teenage hooligan named Tommy (Anson Boon) wakes up chained in the drab basement of a picturesque countryside manor, he finds that his captors aren’t exactly what he expected. Tommy’s being held captive by a seemingly normal family led by the eerily calm Christopher (Stephen Graham), grief-stricken and disturbed Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), and their oddly sweet and obedient son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). Their mission? To turn Tommy into a “good boy.”
And they mean it. Literally.
It’s a premise that teeters between dark fantasy and psychological horror, and Komasa leans into the ambiguity with unsettling precision. The film never over explains its world, and much of its power lies in the way it keeps audiences guessing.
The mystery of the “why?” drives the film, but it’s the performances that root it. Graham is terrifying not because he shouts, but because he doesn’t. He plays Christopher as overly polite, composed, and just “off” enough to make your skin crawl. Riseborough plays Kathryn as a ghost of a woman, incapacitated by grief but complicit in something much darker. And then there’s Jonathan, played with angelic sincerity as the perfect little boy who quietly carries a creeping unease.
The production design is deceptively simple and claustrophobic, with most of the film taking place in the family’s country house and their drab, concrete basement. Their home is neat, cozy, and normal, and that’s exactly what makes it so horrifying. There’s a real darkness here not just in the literal imprisonment, but in the aching, unresolved grief and twisted attempt at control that’s behind it.
Cruel, bleak, and deeply uncomfortable, “Good Boy” definitely is not for everyone. It’s a wickedly strange, psychologically rich, and brutal fairy tale that explores just how far humans will go to fix what’s broken inside them.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 