Tommy is 19 years old and out of control, fuelled by alcohol, drugs, sex, foul language and violence. In a fast-paced montage, we see the many misdeeds he commits in the space of one evening at a nightclub with friends. He’s vile, and within minutes we hate him. These are the opening frames of Good Boy, the new movie by Polish director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi [+lee también:
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entrevista: Bartosz Bielenia
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ficha de la película], nominated for an Oscar), and this is our introduction to its wild protagonist, played with a healthy dose of arrogance and shamelessness by 25-year-old English actor Anson Boon (of Widow Clicquot and the crime series Mobland). Following its premiere in Toronto’s Centrepiece section and a stint in London’s BFI, the film was screened in competition at the 20th Rome Film Fest where Boon was named Best Actor (read our news).

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After this distressing introduction to the movie’s main character, the spotlight shifts to gentle father Chris (Stephen Graham, awarded multiple trophies for the series Adolescence [+lee también:
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ficha de la serie]) who hires a young Macedonian woman called Rina (Monika Frajczyk) as a cleaner, warning her that she might see something strange in his beautiful home in the heart of the Yorkshire countryside – where he lives with his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and his 12-year-old son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) – but that she shouldn’t worry because everything’s under control. The strange thing in question can be found in the basement, and it’s a boy with a chain around his neck who’s none other than Tommy himself. Chris abducted him when the boy was stumbling along the street at the end of his wild night out, and now the family man plans to keep him prisoner in order to re-educate him by way of classical music, books, audio lessons on how to allay anger, videos raising awareness of the dangers of drugs and driving while under the influence, and a kind of “Ludovico therapy” where the 19-year-old is forced to re-watch his videos - which have gone viral on social media and which either show him beating someone to a pulp or bullying a child – to the point of nausea.

Everything is incredibly unsettling and ambiguous in this film, which includes Jerzy Skolimowski (EO [+lee también:
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entrevista: Jerzy Skolimowski
ficha de la película]) among its producers. What initially comes across as a method of punishment/re-education motivated by the best (though decidedly extreme) intentions soon reveals a far darker side. Composed of a depressed mother, a contrastingly, eternally smiley son (his nickname is “Sunshine”) and an attentive father who’s trying to find a way to piece things back together, this strange family hides a painful past. In this sense, the film moves from social critique (of young people cut adrift, dependent on welfare, disrespectful of everything and tending towards self-pity, therefore in need of re-education) to psychological thriller, in which we’re no longer sure who’s the victim or the perpetrator. Whether biological or acquired, a family is a unit which protects, but it also imprisons, controls and manipulates. Love can indeed turn into a cage, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Ultimately, Komasa confirms he’s far from predictable with this discomforting, unsettling yet entertaining film.

Good Boy was produced by Skopia Film (Poland) and Recorded Picture Company (UK) and is sold worldwide by British firm HanWay Films.