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\n\tIn all its glorious oddness, Good Boy recalls a particular boom time in British exploitation cinema for horror films that weren\u2019t necessarily horror films, movies with titles like Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, What the Peeper Saw and almost anything by Peter Walker. The latter\u2019s House of Whipcord would be a useful reference when describing Jan Komasa<\/a>\u2019s thoroughly entertaining debut, since it\u2019s a similarly dark and acerbic comedy about moral rectitude, Walker\u2019s film being the story of a \u201cloose\u201d young woman falling into the clutches of a deranged former judge and his wife, who live in a private prison.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Komasa\u2019s case, the victim is male: Tommy (Anson Boon), a disruptive internet influencer whose TikToks advocate violence and recklessness. Tommy walks the talk, and the film\u2019s opening salvo illustrates a typical night on the town for him. \u201cI\u2019m f*ckin\u2019 buzzin\u2019,\u201d he declares, before embarking on a drink- and drug-soaked party night that involves masturbation, vomit, sex, more alcohol and drugs, before passing out in the street and, unbeknownst to him, into the hands of a stranger.<\/p>\n \n\tThe person who finds out what happened to him is Rina (Monika Frajczyk), an illegal immigrant applying for work as a housekeeper at a big, remote estate in the countryside. Her employers are the genial Chris (Stephen Graham<\/a>) and his quiet wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough<\/a>), and the interview process is quite intrusive (\u201cDo you have any children? Distinguishing marks? Tattoos?\u201d). On her first day on the job, she is alarmed when Chris confiscates her mobile, insisting, \u201cWe don\u2019t use phones in the house.\u201d But she is positively shocked to encounter Tommy, shackled to a makeshift bed in the basement.<\/p>\n \n\tThe setup is pure torture porn, and when Tommy reacts violently toward his captors, he is savagely beaten, satisfying those expectations in the short term. But soon it transpires that this isn\u2019t really who Chris is. His backstory is hinted at but left ambiguous; suffice to say that Chris and his wife haven\u2019t taken Tommy off the streets to kill him \u2014 they actually are trying to save him, albeit in an unorthodox and non-denominational way.<\/p>\n \n\tTommy doesn\u2019t see this at first, telling Chris, \u201cI\u2019m gonna rip off your skull, and I\u2019m gonna stab you in the dick.\u201d But when he meets their crazily cheerful son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), Tommy realizes that there\u2019s some kind of a salvage plan here, and that there will be a chance to escape later if he plays along.<\/p>\n \n\tThis battle of wits is at the core of Komasa\u2019s film, which owes a little bit of a debt to A Clockwork Orange (the book more than the film). The longer Tommy stays under the family\u2019s roof, the more he appears to respond, plowing through the novels that Kathryn has laid out for him. He even discovers cinema, having his evening ruined on movie night by a screening of Ken Loach\u2019s tragic masterpiece Kes. In time, he is moved upstairs into a bedroom, still chained by the neck but mobile thanks to a network of rails that allow him to move from room to room.<\/p>\n \n\tLike an early Yorgos Lanthimos, the strangeness of the premise does a lot of heavy lifting, but the performers literally bring character to what might easily have been a one-note movie. Boon is scarily convincing as Tommy, bringing out the twin barrels of intelligence and ignorance that make him so dangerous. Riseborough is suitably ghost-like as Kathryn, who is secretly the heart and soul of this misguided mission in which Chris is the brain. Fresh from Adolescence, though, it\u2019s Graham who steals the show, using his newly minted everyman persona to creepy effect. Chris is like a more benign Jigsaw from the Saw movies; his weapon is his judgment, and \u2014 like a father from heaven, or indeed hell \u2014 his disappointment is something to be feared.<\/p>\n \n\tTitle:<\/strong> Good Boy
Festival:<\/strong> Toronto (Centrepiece)
Director:<\/strong> Jan Komasa
Screenwriters:<\/strong> Bartek Bartosik, Naqqash Khalid
Cast:<\/strong> Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Anson Boon, Kit Rakusen, Monika Frajczyk
Sales agent:<\/strong> Hanway
Running time:<\/strong> 1 hr 50 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In all its glorious oddness, Good Boy recalls a particular boom time in British exploitation cinema for horror…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":213723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[116915,171,116916,53,2290,82349,77123,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-213722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-andrea-riseborough","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jan-komasa","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-review","13":"tag-stephen-graham","14":"tag-toronto-film-festival","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115176249999612133","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}