The Good Boy - Film Review - Fremantle Shipping News

Directed by Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi) and starring Anson Boon, Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, and Kit Rakusen. Gayle attended The Good Boy with her mother on Saturday June 20th, courtesy of Luna Palace Cinemas. Both enjoyed it mightily!

Tommy is trouble.

He marches the streets puffed up with youthful arrogant deliquency and a woman on his arm. He’s out to create havoc again with his cronies, partying hard, drinking, abusing drugs, picking fights, vandalising property, and cheating on his girlfriend for good measure. All within the first ten minutes of the film.

After Tommy eventually peels off from his friends he staggers homeward. He’s snatched from the street. Tommy wakes up groggy, clad in fresh pajamas, with his neck chained to a basement ceiling.

Time for Tommy to learn a lesson.

This film is nail-biting tense, absurd, darkly funny, and often very moving. I held my breath as it finally clicked for cocky roughmouthed social media profiteer Tommy, that disobedience means torture and his best bet of escape means pretending to become a part of the family in this secluded household. It also means pretending that these insane circumstances are normal. Anson Boon (from Danny Boyle’s series about subvertive punk rock band The Sex Pistols) is cast perfectly in this role, managing to flip my disdain for him to then urgently willing him to survive.

A scary, early scene is our introduction to Rina (played by Monika Frajczyk), a Macedonian refugee running from a horrible past now blackmailed into cleaning for the family. She blinks past the foreboding interview questions (“any identifying marks or blemishes?”) and later visibly recoils in horror at the sight of Tommy. Yet whatever it is she’s running from is somehow worse than the threat of winding up chained next to him.

One of the absolute standout stars of this film has to be Kit Rakusen (“The Phonecian Scheme”, “Belfast”, “The Famous Five”, “Doctor Who”), who captivated our hearts immediately upon introduction to the scene as young Jonathan. He brings a pure, honest energy to the screen, desparately watching his father for approval after introducing him to Tommy, an exchange he’d clearly rehearsed in advance.

Stephen Graham, who’ll you’ll recognise as the protective father in the hit series “Adolescence”, “Peaky Blinders”, and “Boiling Point”, is a marvel. His character is a strange throwback to a more innocent time with his dated dress sense and deadpan earnestness, as honest as the toupee hairs on his head. We found ourselves sympathising for him and even rooting for him to rekindle his stagnating marriage. Then in a heartbeat we’d be reminded of why Tommy needs to be terrified of him.

On the topic of terror, Andrea Riseborough (“Possesor”, “Birdman”, “Oblivion”) shines. We are introduced to her as a spectral, laconic, housebound grieving mother and come to see her as an icy Lady Macbeth.

The gravity of each scene lands heavily with the camera lingering in place upon its subjects. Something as simple as a cassette player under a flickering light or the laying down of a dinner bowl on the ground conveys so much in a still shot.

The film takes ample inspiration from Malcolm McDowell’s psychopathic teenage character and attempts at his rehabilitation in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and the tyrannical controlling father figure in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. It also delivers a monstrous twist that I didn’t see coming.