Good Boy

Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough are superbly creepy in a not-quite-horror that begins promisingly but teases more than it delivers.

Tommy (Anson Boon) is a deeply antisocial young man. On a drink-and-drug-fuelled night out, he starts fights, openly cheats on his sort-of girlfriend and intimidates anyone who crosses his path. After various substances cause him to black out, he wakes up in a basement, chained to the wall by his neck. He’s now the prisoner of married couple Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), who intend to teach Chris the error of his ways and make him the titular good boy. They keep him in the basement of their remote home while they live upstairs with their fraught son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), and immigrant housekeeper Rina (Monika Frajczyk), who the couple threaten with deportation if she gives them away. 

Initially, Tommy tries desperately to escape and treats his captors as the villains they are, but as they start to give him a level of attention, however dark, that he’s never received, his feelings about them become blurred. His attempts to escape are less urgent. His conversation with them more vulnerable. 

It’s stubbornly short on plot or twists

Like Tommy, director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi) operates with hazy intentions and lands somewhere intriguing but rather unsatisfying. It becomes almost immediately clear that Tommy isn’t the first person who’s been held in the house, but anyone waiting for any explanation of what came before, how Chris and Kathryn became this way, or why and how they settled on Tommy specifically is going to be left wanting. It’s stubbornly short on plot or twists. If the tone had been wilder and more distinct, it could perhaps have been accepted as a nightmare world where logic doesn’t apply. Instead it feels underwritten, even as it plays interestingly with ideas of nature versus nurture. 

It’s lifted by some very convincing performances. Boon takes a believable path from horrible thug to horrible thug with self-awareness. Graham and Riseborough are playing almost one-note characters, but play that note with sinister effectiveness. They and Komasa create a powerful sense of dread in this house, even if it ultimately feels like we only glance around it instead of investigating its darkest corners.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Mar 20.