Good Boy

“Tommy” (Anson Boon) is an odious cretin of a teenager who bullies, boozes and snorts his way through life until one night he finds himself all alone and somewhat the worse for wear. Next morning, we meet “Rina” (Monika Frajczyk) who has arrived at a remote country house where she is rather perfunctorily interviewed for a cleaning job by “Christopher” (Stephen Graham). On her subsequent tour of their home she is introduced to his borderline catatonic wife “Catherine” (Andrea Riseborough) and their son “Jonathan” (Kit Rakusen) before being taken downstairs to the basement and encountering a lad who is chained to the wall. Yep, that’s our “Tommy” - just as foul mouthed and threatening as before, only now he’s a bit more sober. Oddly enough, that doesn’t scare off “Rina” and so we know that she must have problems of her own as we now follow quite a menacingly bizarre process of what could be called rehabilitation for the angry young man, and possibly for others too. What I did enjoy here was the powerfully charismatic effort from a Boon who genuinely came across as obnoxious as we start out but who becomes someone altogether more shrewd as the dynamics in the house change in a series of quite unexpected ways. Just watch his eyes! Riseborough is also on solid form as her persona deceives effectively and with about half an hour left it’s fairly safe to say that I hadn’t really much of a clue what was going to happen to whom at the end. Stockholm syndrome maybe? Faux-Stockholm syndrome maybe? Watch and see, it’s worth it and I expect to see a lot more of Anson Boon.

Polish director Jan Komasa is emerging as a serious talent worth watching. With HEEL, we are given something that initially recalls A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but gradually feels closer to a folk-horror variation on THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE — a psychological tale of confinement, forced rehabilitation, and a very bad boy being coerced into becoming good. Before we get there, however, HEEL opens with what feels like 15 different production-company logos flashing across the screen — an unintentionally hilarious parade that starts to resemble a FAMILY GUY gag before the actual movie finally begins. But once the film gets going, it grabs ahold of you and rarely loosens its grip. Local Yorkshire droog Tommy (played by Anson Boon) is addicted to booze, drugs, sex and violence — wreaking havoc wherever he goes in a whirlwind of debauchery. Like a music video from The Prodigy, Tommy snorts, glugs, and rages aimlessly through life until one fateful evening when, in a drunken stupor, he is separated from his pals after collapsing unconscious in the street. When Tommy awakes, he discovers himself chained like a dog to a dingy mattress in the cellar of a Yorkshire farmhouse, tended to by Chris (Stephen Graham). We sense sinister motives behind the kidnapping — though it's hard to feel an ounce of sympathy for the loathsome Tommy — as Chris makes his intentions clear: Tommy will be "corrected" until he can be reformed and welcomed into their family as an older brother to their son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), and a son to his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough). Nursing a recent tragedy, Chris, Kathryn and son Jonathan — each broken in their own way — have constructed an unsettling domestic fantasy in which Tommy isn't merely their prisoner, but a replacement piece intended to fill a void that grief has left behind. Not one to buckle easily, Tommy puts up one hell of a fight, rebelling against his incarceration with abusive language and a torrent of threats that underscore the sheer improbability of this twisted *Pygmalion* experiment. The harder Chris attempts to hammer Tommy into the shape of a civilized human being, the more apparent it becomes that this bizarre rehabilitation may transform everyone involved. But Komasa's film (written by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid) has several surprises in this psychological tale of family, trauma, acceptance and trust that begs the question: can empathy be taught to someone as wayward as Tommy? With incredible performances by Boon, the always brilliant Graham and Riseborough, HEEL is one of the biggest surprises of the year — a disturbing and unexpectedly moving examination of damaged people attempting to repair one another through deeply damaged means. What begins as a sinister tale of captivity and forced rehabilitation gradually becomes something far more compassionate, suggesting that even in the most unlikely of people, empathy may not simply be innate — it can be learned.