Review: The Good Boy – I am not a dog on a chain

Directed by Jan Komasa
Starring Stephen Graham, Ansen Boon, Monika Frajczyk, Andrea Riseborough

5.5/10

Young British delinquent Tommy (Anson Boon) is running amok in the streets of London one night with his mates when he is suddenly abducted. He finds himself chained up in the basement of a large estate mansion on the outskirts of town, imprisoned by the polite but sanctimonious Chris (Stephen Graham), his quiet and reclusive wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their well-mannered young son Johnathon (Kit Rakusen).

Tommy is kept like a social experiment, where good behaviour is rewarded and bad behaviour is punished. Over time, he is given more liberties, such as more room in the house to roam (chain still around his neck). There’s some amusement in seeing how he begins to become integrated into the family, being allowed to sit with them watching a movie or going on a picnic, and there’s tension in wondering if he’s acting good in earnest or simply trying to escape.

There’s a little bit of A Clockwork Orange in here, with Chris using this tense rehabilitation to kerb Tommy’s villainous ways. But whereas Alex deLarge was being reconditioned to stop his criminal behaviour that included rape and murder, Tommy is simply being a bit of a bully with people on the street for social media clout. There’s no thematic depth at all with Chris trying to get Tommy to be a little less of a hooligan.

Also making appearances in the house is their maid Rina (Monika Frajczyk), who the family makes no attempts to hide Tommy away from, which seems to make sense simply because Rina won’t leave due to her troubling visa issues. Since her inclusion in the film ultimately has very little bearing on the story, her presence seems to be for some sort of thematic reason: that she herself also feels chained up in her own way as an immigrant on the run—it’s a very blunt comparison that seems only present but is not substantially explored at all.

And this is all topped with an ending that comes across as thoroughly ridiculous and not believable at all. Maybe it could have been more realistic if there was far more thought put into the character relations, particularly with how Tommy felt about his life before the kidnapping (of which hardly anything was shown). But instead, the film has to urge the audience to just “go along with it” so that it can contrive some sort of ironic conclusion, very much at the detriment of the film’s believability.

It’s unfortunate that Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa has delivered such an underwhelming psychological thriller with The Good Boy, as his last film The Hater was a far, far more precisely insightful film on the disturbing psychology surrounding the modern internet usage of young men and how it affects the reality of their offline lives. It was flawed but ambitious and daring and often unpredictable with its own tale, so it feels unfathomable that something like The Good Boy could, conversely, be so underwhelming, by-the-books, and toothless in comparison despite the disturbing and intriguing premise.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN