At the 2026 Dublin International Film Festival, Jan Komasa presented Anniversary and The Good Boy (releasing as Heel in the U.S) back to back. Two new films. One festival. Two radically different premises. One a tense family drama shaped by political radicalisation, the other a darkly comic rehabilitation experiment.
Komasa, whose Corpus Christi earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature, has long been drawn to moral ambiguity. From Suicide Room to The Hater, he has built a body of work defined by psychological intensity. With Anniversary (now streaming on Netflix in the UK) and The Good Boy (in UK and Irish cinemas March 20), he pushes himself even further, embracing dystopian allegory and dark comedy.
In conversation with our writer, Lauren Gallagher, in Dublin, Komasa reflected on departing from realism, directing an ensemble cast, and the fear of watching someone you love become a stranger:
TPM: It’s rare to see two films from one director screening at the same festival. Did you conceive The Good Boy and Anniversary as completely separate processes, or were they part of the same phase of your filmmaking?
Usually, it helps when you bounce off one film to make another one. So, like with Corpus Christi and The Hater, my previous films, I was doing them simultaneously. Corpus Christi was about a guy who was doing a lot of good for the community, even though he was lying. And The Hater was about a guy who was doing the opposite.
It was really easy for me to do a black and white type of direction and split my brain in two. It was harder with Anniversary and The Good Boy. Because they are just different planets, in terms of genres. But the thing is, I deviated from realistic storytelling in both. Anniversary is a dystopian film. And it ends up in a really unrealistic place. Even though it’s an allegory of sorts. And with The Good Boy, obviously, it’s a different breed. Some people say it’s a black comedy, depending on your sense of humour.
I always build multi-layered structures with actors. And here I couldn’t really do it, according to the alphabet I knew. I had to sort of build my own new alphabet. And it was scary at first, but then I felt like I had to just trust my gut and go with the flow and still be truthful. So even if it took place on the moon, or on Tatooine, or in the Upside Down, I would have to know the psychology of the monster. That’s how I think, and I can’t get rid of it.
I was clinging to what felt most natural to me, which was psychology. That was my inner anchor in both films. Even if Anniversary moves into dystopia, it had to feel consequential and find its own rhythm. The same with The Good Boy — it’s a seemingly normal family keeping a man on a chain, which is not normal, but everything had to grow logically from that situation. It became a kind of thought experiment. Everything I’d done before was rooted in realism, so this was about opening new doors.
I didn’t realise that Corpus Christi and The Hater were made at the same time, but I suppose they were only released a few months apart.
Actually, they were released at the same time. With Corpus Christi, we were at the Oscars in 2020, then I had a vacation for 10 days, then we came back to Poland, and we had a premiere of The Hater. And six days later, pandemic. Two months later, it won at Tribeca. I was actually shuffling actors. I thought maybe the [main] character from The Hater could play the priest [in Corpus Christi]. We went the other way with Bartosz Bielenia.
You know, the blue piercing gaze, I thought he could be in The Hater, but then it would probably be much more on the nose. Obviously, The Hater would be much more robotic and psychotic. Maciej Musiałowski [from The Hater], his priest for Corpus Christ, I would probably be much more rock and roll, because Maciej is like this in real life. So I just swapped them.
It made it harder for them. It wasn’t by the book. For Maciej, who’s like distracted and ADHD, he had to play someone who’s very collected in The Hater. And for Bartosz, who’s very collected and very structured internally, super conscious of everything, he had to play a character who is rock and roll for Corpus Christi. And he just starts to kind of breathe life into this little village. So it was kind of the same here with actors and energies for the Anniversary.
The Anniversary was more like a continuation of The Hater. So, The Hater ends with a guy entering a family, and Anniversary starts with a girl entering a family. The same starting and ending point. Anniversary, in the beginning, was designed as a continuation of The Hater. My original idea was for a guy to enter the family. And then, when we found Lori Gambino, who is a brilliant scriptwriter, she proposed to change the gender of the fiancé. So he is a she, Phoebe Dynevor’s character, and suddenly it’s a film about women clashing over territory. And maybe of viral infection. We have five phases of viral infection, such as attachment, multiplication, and so on. We use this biological allegory to talk about the dynamic between the Liz character (Phoebe Dynevor) and Ellen (Diane Lane), who is the host cell, and the virus that is in love with the host. It’s not an invasion; it’s like the virus would love to be part of the cell, and tries to mimic the cell, but it will never be part of it. Then by the end of it, no spoilers, but maybe she grows to understand that she will not be one of them.
It’s interesting to hear that the idea started with The Hater because it seems like the first time that we’ve really seen family dynamics and ensemble casts at this scale in your films. I first saw Suicide Room as a goth teenager, and it was very important to me.
Oh, really? Sorry about that. I did that with a lot of angst in me. And I really wanted to speak out and say something important. That’s why this film was pretty special to me. And the energy from that film stayed on. Even today, people send me messages about it. It’s become a meme.
Both Suicide Room and Corpus Christi felt like intense, focused character studies. Anniversary and The Good Boy still have that intensity, but they also seem lighter and funnier at times. Was that tonal shift affected by working with actors on a larger scale?
It was interesting. Coming from Poland, I thought of myself as the outsider on the English-speaking set. And then I quickly learned that everybody on this set has a different background. That was my first lesson because it’s my first English language project. The second one was something I learned. Once an actor or actress plays a leading role in any film, it’s usually rare to step down to play a supportive role. So suddenly, you had six or seven people here in our film who already played leading roles in other films or TV series. And suddenly they’re part of something bigger, because they each had very strong character arcs. My job was as a conductor to sort of make this orchestra play, or at least sail in the same direction. I come from a big family too, and when I watched a TV series like Succession, I could see the dynamic of love and hate relationships. And totally could relate to it.
With your sister or brother, you punch, you take punches, it’s normal. But it usually comes from a place of care and love, even though it might be expressed in a sometimes vicious way. What I was playing with the most in Anniversary was this notion of what it would be like to lose one of your loved ones to an ideology that would change the person you thought you had known. To change the person into a stranger.
And that’s terrifying. I started to imagine what it would be like to look into your loved one’s eyes and feel coldness. Like a cold stare from a stranger who would easily push you under the bus. That’s what terrified me. And I started to see this in some distant members of my family because of the ideological changes in Poland. And like in many countries today, polarisation is huge. Suddenly, you have members of your family who don’t speak to you anymore. Or maybe you speak, but you never really talk; that relationship changes. You could just go about your daily life without that person, and that’s scar, that’s where the real apocalypse started in my head. When I was imagining the real terror of this film, it’s not the fact that you get killed because you believe in something. It’s the moment you lose a person. The moment your family tells you you’re expendable.
But I loved making it. My ADHD felt taken care of. Because I was super overstimulated when I was shooting it. Also, the actor’s strike and many, many other limitations. It’s an independent film. We just wanted to make this film to do something creative and different. I barely remember most of the shooting period because I was too exhausted. I was overstimulated,d and after every day, I literally spent an hour or more lying in a bathtub trying to recover.
I can’t even imagine how exhausting it must have been to make Corpus Christi and The Hater concurrently. Then to be making Anniversary and The Good Boy together so soon after.
I imagined [them] very closely, and The Good Boy was actually meant to be the first film. We were very close to making it, and I don’t remember what it was; there were some procedural problems. We decided to freeze The Good Boy, and then Anniversary came along. So, we did Anniversary and five months late,r we were already shooting The Good Boy.
In recent years, rs the film industry has been shaped by the COVID pandemic and the writers’ strikes. There was a period of time where we didn’t see a new release from you, and now Anniversary and The Good Boy are arriving close together. During that time, were you resting or developing projects behind the scenes?
My process is that I don’t know how to rest, really. I work a lot, and obviously, I’m involved in many projects. Some people would say too many. That’s what I heard numerous times from my agents, my friends and my family. I just can’t stop. I feel like I have to use everything I have in my life to just do as much as I can. Now I’m trying to sort of filter it. So, even if I’m half interested in a project, I will just say no. I’m effective. I just deliver. I also did a lot of commercials in my life, over 200. I did two TV series in Poland, one ballet show, I teach at a film school, and I go with lecturers around the world to different universities.
I’m used to working a lot, workaholism, that’s my thing. And that’s the decision. I’m a big boy, so I decided to do this. Today I’m kind of trying to, as a filmmaker, tap into my inner self and understand that I don’t have to tire myself with bullshi;, I have just one life. It took me maybe 25 years to understand it, but here we are.
You said you’re going to try to be a little bit more selective with work. Are you just going to enjoy the process of rolling out both films, or are you already thinking about the next project?
I’m already booked for my next project. But at least this project is something I really wanted to do for a long time. It’s in Polish. I’m being sent propositions because now is the moment, but maybe this is the first time in my life I need to focus on just one thing. For good or bad, I’ll try. I’m going to learn something new.
The Good Boy is in UK cinemas from March 20th.
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