The Good Boy (aka Heel) had its Scottish première at Glasgow Film Festival, 1 Mar 2026
“I’m my own man. I’m not some dog you can just take in. I’m a real fucking person.”
So complains Tommy (Anson Boon) some way into Jan Komasa’s first English-language feature The Good Boy, which has been retitled Heel for the American market presumably to avoid confusion with recent similarly titled films like Viljar Bøe’s Good Boy (aka Me, You & Frank, 2022) and Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025). Both titles come from phrases used by dog owners either to encourage or to curb their male pets’ behaviour, and the character Chris (Stephen Graham) will actually say ‘good boy’ several times to Tommy, and once to Chris’s own much younger son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen).
Certainly Tommy requires a leash to be put on his behaviour. For when we first meet him, he is leading a pack of droog-like associates out on a hedonistic night of clubbing in a North England city, and it becomes clear that he is all at once drug-taking delinquent, priapic chancer, aggressive bully and vandalistic criminal, repaying the love and loyalty of his clean girlfriend Gabby (Savannah Steyn) by constantly trying to push drugs on her, and by betraying her with another woman. He is not a good boy. Yet as he staggers home from the night’s revelries, he is snatched from the street, and wakes up, his neck locked to a chain, in the rural home of Chris, his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their good-natured, well-bred son Jonathan. So begins the long process of this mad dog’s domestication.
The Good Boy really is reminiscent of Bøe’s Good Boy, not to mention Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009), Kevin Smith’s Tusk (2014), Carles Torrens’ Pet (2016), Nicholas Pesce’s Piercing(2018), J.-P. Valkeapää’s Dogs Don’t Wear Pants(2019), Josh Stifter’s Greywood’s Plot (2019), Aik Karapetian’s Samuel’s Travels (Squeal, 2021) and Juan Albarracìn’s El Instinto (Instinct, 2024), in that it reduces its protagonist to an animal in need of training and taming, and shifts from an initial cat-and-mouse abduction-and-escape thriller into a more profound examination of nature and nurture, of conditioning and behaviourism, and of what it means to find, indeed to earn, one’s place in a loving (and loved) family.
As Tommy becomes acclimatised to his new, highly restricted way of life, as he staves off boredom with a reading list of improving books, and as his good conduct is rewarded with ever greater freedoms (and his bad with punishments), he – and we with him – learn more about this broken family, haunted by loss. They, it will turn out, need Tommy as much as he is growing to depend on them. There are two other members of this household: Rina (Monika Frajczyk), initially chosen for her compromised immigration status, who comes to clean the house twice a week, and is dogged by her own family troubles; and Jonathan’s brother Charlie, spoken of only in whispers and, though absent, leaving traces of himself like scars all over the house.
When Tommy first arrives in the house, Kathryn is something of a ghost, drifting from room to room while barely there at all, and emotionally inaccessible to her nearest and dearest. Her fragile emergence from herself, expertly articulated by Riseborough in a nuanced and moving performance, little by little shows what a mother can and should be, and the domestic environment and unconditional love that she offers Tommy contrasts with his own loveless home life. As Tommy slowly withdraws from his addictions, controls his compulsions, sees clearly for the first time, and undergoes a profound reform of character, all while on a chain and kept like a pet, the family that has adopted him is also rebuilding itself around him.
“This is not a movie,” Chris tells Tommy near the beginning of his captivity, “this is real life.” Chris is obviously, on at least some level, mistaken – for not only are we unequivocally watching a movie (even if its characters are unaware that they are in one), but also the events of this film, for all their naturalistic presentation, come across more as allegory or animalistic fable. Tommy has the capacity to become a good boy, even to help others – but he is also a product of his environment, and will change only if his worst learnt behaviours can be brought to heel.
Komasa’s film updates Stanley Kubrick’s classic of social conditioning and rehabilitation, A Clockwork Orange (1971) – where Chris and Kathryn’s version of the Ludovico technique involves making Tommy watch not an arbitrary set of ultraviolent films, but rather his own phone videos of his own antisocial depravities. Even as the couple’s motivations remain somewhat mystified (revenge? random do-gooding? extreme forgiveness?), their methods, which include kidnapping, false imprisonment and occasional physical abuse, are certainly interrogated, as we see the good and bad in all these characters. Ultimately the film seems to embrace – or at least shows Tommy embracing – Chris and Kathryn’s tough love as the special ingredient that makes a family stay and grow together. Yet whether we are to regard what unfolds as a triumph of patient, committed, beneficent parenting, or an extreme case of Stockholm syndrome or cultic initiation, remains an open question, making this as much like Pascal Laugier’s The Tall Man (2008) as like Steven Sheil’s Mum & Dad (2008) or Jennifer Lynch’s Chained (2012) in its ambivalence towards the proper principles of child rearing.
strap: Stay: Jan Komasa’s unsettling family fable shows the forced domestication of a young delinquent
© Anton Bitel
