Good Boy — The Wolf in a Knitted Jumper

Good Boy: full review

📺 Where to watch ES

Movistar Plus+ ↗ + 3 en alquiler

All options →

As an Amazon Associate, Claqueta Ácida earns from qualifying purchases.

Jan Komasa’s cinema has always had an uncomfortable quality: it grabs you by the neck and forces you to look at what you’d rather not see. After Corpus Christi (2019), with its fake priest in a Polish village, the director makes the leap to English-language cinema with Good Boy (released in the US as Heel), a neo-gothic fable written by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid that asks a perverse question: what if someone decided to “rehabilitate” a violent young man without asking his permission?

Tommy (Anson Boon) is nineteen, full of rage and in the habit of filming his own violence for social media. One night, separated from his friends during a bender, he is snatched off the streets of London. He wakes up chained in the basement of an isolated estate in the Yorkshire countryside. Living there are Chris (Stephen Graham), a seemingly mild-mannered family man; his wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough); and their young son, Jonathan. They explain that he can’t leave, and that everything he is about to go through is for his own good.

Direction and mise-en-scène: horror without blood

Komasa shoots the captivity as an exercise in psychology rather than a horror film: there’s barely any explicit violence, but the threat never goes away. The house, with exteriors in Yorkshire and interiors shot in Warsaw, is a space of suffocating order where everything has a rule and every rule a punishment. Michał Dymek’s cinematography gives it the air of a gothic tale, and Abel Korzeniowski’s score underlines the unsettling side of a routine that feels part Victorian boarding school, part domestic cult.

The most original element is the “rehabilitation” system. Chris and Kathryn don’t torture Tommy: they play him anger-management tapes, make him reflect on what he has done and grant him privileges according to his behavior, like being able to move around the house without removing his chain thanks to a pulley system. It’s as absurd as it is unsettling, and Komasa films it with a dry black humor that leaves the viewer unsure whether to laugh or look away.

Performances: the wolf in a knitted jumper

Stephen Graham devours the film. His Chris is a wolf in sheep’s clothing: kind, patient, almost fatherly, and precisely for that reason terrifying. Graham takes his recent everyman image and turns it into something sinister, and every time he smiles the viewer braces. Andrea Riseborough builds Kathryn as a ghostly, enigmatic presence with moments of quiet cruelty that chill the blood, and you sense she is the real engine of the mission. Anson Boon carries the hardest role: an insufferable kid at first whose transformation has to be believable, and he pulls it off with a mix of swagger and fear that evolves without jumps. Monika Frajczyk, as Rina, the housekeeper, provides the only outside view of this family, although her subplot is wrapped up too quickly.

Script: a fable with visible seams

Good Boy works for much of its running time thanks to the strangeness of its premise and the strength of its performers. The script drops hints that Chris and Kathryn may have done this before and that their project stems from a grief it never fully explains, and that ambiguity feeds the tension. The problem is that the characters are drawn with a fine line, almost like figures in a parable, and when the film needs its moral dilemma to carry real weight, it runs out of gas. The final stretch, which we won’t reveal here, will split audiences: for some it will be a bitter, provocative conclusion; for others, an underexplained way out.

The best

• Stephen Graham: A kindly captor scarier than any masked villain.
• Andrea Riseborough: Enigmatic, cold and the true heart of the mission.
• Anson Boon: He makes believable a transformation that seemed impossible on paper.
• The black humor: The self-help tapes and the pulley system are as ridiculous as they are disturbing.

The worst

• Parable characters: Too thin to bear the moral weight the film demands of them.
• The final stretch: It loses steam and borders on the absurd.
• Rina’s subplot: Promising and wrapped up in a hurry.

The Claqueta Ácida Verdict (7.5/10)

🎬 Tráiler Oficial

Abrir en YouTube

Click para reproducir

HD Tráiler