Tommy (Anson Boon), who spends his nights fighting bouncers and consuming everything under the sun and his days terrorising the streets for TikTok views, is not a good boy. But Chris (Stephen Graham), Tommy’s self righteous kidnapper, is determined to change that. This is Jan Komasa’s The Good Boy – not to be confused with the recent canine horror of the same name, although Tommy spends a lot more screen time leashed than the furry thespian – a mild mannered thriller in which a seemingly perfect family, Chris, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their worryingly well behaved son Jonathan (Kit Rakunsen), attempt to turn their asbo prisoner into a respectable member of society.
The Good Boy aspires to be a twisted fable of damaged individuals, but it can’t bring itself to mine the depths of human intimacy and cruelty the way a Haneke film would seek to disturb us. In fact the torture itself is excruciatingly tame. One beating aside (the only moment where Graham’s blood pressure spikes in an otherwise composed performance), Tommy is mainly subjected to after school specials, canonical literature and a family screening of Kes.
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The most effective method of behavioural modification comes from repeated viewings of Tommy’s own TikTok content, filled with joyriding, bullying school kids and cackling maniacally with his loutish cronies. Tommy’s unchecked crimes are carefully crafted moments of sinister tension which share in Eden Lake’s realism and the audacity of A Clockwork Orange’s violent droogs. At first Tommy is proud of his videos, after all they are his only achievement in his short life. He even runs a commentary: “I got so many views on this one yano”. It’s in this instance, The Good Boy gets to what Komasa is needling at. Tommy is a direct product of the attention economy. His unquenchable thirst for violence and hedonism in any form within his grasp, is a result of the amorality of social media. Much like the Manosphere influencers Louis Theroux flimsily interrogated, Tommy’s ego is inflated with every controversy. Chris’ condescending tone and old-fashioned ethics are no match for this streamlined evolution of toxic masculinity.
Had The Good Boy restrained itself in the way it does Tommy, it may have had a more claustrophobic effect. But an unnecessary subplot concerning the Macedonian cleaner Rina (Monika Frajczyk), willing to turn a blind eye to kidnapping due to her visa issues, emerges. When she is off screen the silences were filled by my mind wondering why she had even been introduced in the first place. And eventually with such an unsatisfying climax to this addition with a thuggish criminal family, her own very real problems that make it apparent why the boy in her employer’s basement is not a pressing concern for her.
Despite Boon matching Graham’s quiet intensity and Riseborough’s low frequency depression with a gnashing rebellious streak, the three performances can’t lift The Good Boy from the limitations of its own tethered melodrama. While Komasa hopes to reckon with morality in an increasingly immoral world, for all its sincerity, like many others it failed to answer what is to be done about young men right now. A mother’s devoted love being the only eye-rolling misogynistic solution to badly behaving boys.
