We’ve been obsessed with The Good Boy since its UK premiere at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, and now you can see what the fuss is all about as the dark thriller with Stephen Graham is finally out in UK and Irish cinemas.
Directed by Jan Komasa, the thriller – also known as Heel in the US – sees 19-year-old hooligan Tommy (Anson Boon) abducted by Chris (Graham) after a heavy night of partying. Tommy wakes up chained in the basement of Chris and Kathryn’s (Andrea Riseborough) home, who intend to reform Tommy’s unruly behaviour using any measure necessary.
As we mentioned in our five-star review, The Good Boy is an excellent thriller that is unlike anything you’ll see this year. “It all makes for a compelling genre blend of dark thriller, absurdist comedy and thought-provoking drama that you won’t be able to look away from,” we added.
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Related: The Good Boy is unlike anything you’ll see this year
And we’re not the only ones to praise it as the movie stands at a strong 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes following its US release earlier this month.
“Graham and Riseborough prove yet again that they can find humanity in even the most disturbing characters,” wrote The Times, with The New York Times adding: “[The Good Boy] slots neatly into the work of a director who luxuriates in pitch-black fables with chewy moral centres.”
Don’t just take their word for it though. You can now see for yourself as The Good Boy was released in cinemas across the UK and Ireland today.
Ahead of its release in cinemas, director Jan Komasa revealed to Digital Spy that the movie was originally very different when he first read the script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid.
“The original Polish story was set in the outskirts of Warsaw and it was very brutal, much more brutal than it is now and visceral. The beginning was 40 minutes of the main character doing horrible stuff, hooligan fights and all this, and it was pretty gruesome,” he explained.
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“One day I remember I got the review from South Korea about my other film Corpus Christi and the review goes like, ‘It’s a nice film about post-war Poland’. It’s amazing how people take your material and treat it differently because your film is Polish or your film is Chilean or Italian, whatever. You put the national lens to just read it.
“I remember I told [producer] Jerzy Skolimowski [that] if we do this in Polish, some portion of the audience will treat this as a commentary on Poland. Maybe some people think that we have people in the basement and stuff, jokingly. So, Jerzy called his long-time friend, the producer Jeremy Thomas, and we decided to just do it in English.”
We can all be glad of the change as it means we got to see Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough proving why they’re two of the greatest actors we have, so it feels like the right change for the movie.
The Good Boy is out now in UK and Irish cinemas.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.