Good Boy, Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa is a reflection on the instability of affective bonds in the digital world. Presented at the Toronto Festival 2025, the film produced by Jerzy Skolimowski arrives in Italian theatres from March 6.
Good Boy, al cinema
Tommy (Anson Boon) is a 19-year-old from unregulated life, uses drugs, drinks, acts of bullying and bullying to women and children. In a particularly wild evening the young man loses his senses to awaken chained in a cellar. His jailers are a couple, Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), who imprisoned him with the aim of forcefully reeducating him to finally make him a good boy.
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Polish director drops the story in an indefinite UK campaign, in an isolated villa that becomes a microcosm. As in Kynodontas (2009), the family follows strict rules and sometimes bizarre, only the father can open the gate and cannot use the mobile phones. Rituals and impositions make the house a prison not only for Tommy, but also for the son of the couple Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) who does not even go to school, and for the same Kathryn, depressed at times catatonic, presence that infests the environment. Only Chris is allowed to leave taking care of all the good father familias events.
Good Boy, la recensione: esplorare l’adolescenza
Komasa returns to explore the relationship between teens, violence and social networks as already inicide Room and Haters, to operate a satire on the weakness of interpersonal ties in a hyperlinked society. All Tommy’s scorribands are in fact framed by his smartphone and published live on social media, in a glorification of all-digital violence. As a new Ludovico cure, Chris compels Tommy to review the footage of his misdeeds (strictly on a cathodic tube TV) and submits him to re-educative videotapes to treat ultraviolence 3.0. Analog and digital is also the clash between prison and prisoner, where the first represents the violence of the abusive post-war education, while the second the superficiality of the abuse, as the director himself suggests on several occasions.
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The clash between two generations through the education process ends up becoming exchange: Tommy, in fact, during the prison, is physically bound, broken and punished, but is also encouraged to read books, to reason about his (self)destructive behaviors and to bind with his jailers, just as if he was part of the family. Of course dysfunctional and tyrannical, but still a family, entering a system of care and teaching.
In the film’s watershed scene Tommy is invited for the first time to participate in a movie evening on the couch. Through the vision of Kes of Ken Loach Tommy begins to enter empathy with marginality, also beginning to understand his nature as a neglected subject, victim of an indifferent biological family. Intricate in the abuse cycle, the protagonist feels for the first time chosen and seen by someone who takes care of him, even with a certain tenderness.
Un film da non perdere
Oscar-winning director stated that the film is a provocative love letter to tyranny: is it worth renouncing some freedom to earn a family (or a state) that takes care of you?
The questioning of the bourgeois nuclear family by a disturbing element also recalls another film by Yorgos Lanthimos, The Sacrifice of the sacred deer. There, of course, the dynamic was opposite, but the grotesque and sadistic trajectories of interpersonal relationships show a damaged and close architecture. The “original” family is shocked by the alleged disappearance of another child, a question that is never fully clarified, of which Tommy somehow becomes a substitute.
Parentality in this sense acts as a mission, such as the training of a rabid dog: being a mother and being a father is a role to which one cannot in any way renounce and that it completely overlaps with the identity of Kathryn and Chris who end up incorporating in the family also the lady of the Rina cleaning, an adult to all effects. To survive mourning, the only possible way is to violently reiterate the tyrannical institution of the family.
Tommy, in the same way, initially abruptly rejects the role of his son, whose mother does not even denounce his disappearance, and then end up adapting to that norm as it was nature.
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Good Boy is a film that manages his provocations in a laid manner, even if he leaves some troubled issues in the cosmos of the film, focusing rather on the parables of the protagonists. The ideas of reflection on the family institution and its corrective function are numerous but not always come to the point, resulting in many metaphors sometimes a little confused. The performances of the almost emerging Boon (winner as Best Actor at the Film Festival of Rome) and Riseborough, now perfectly comfortable in borderline roles, give unpublished thickness to a dark and grotesque affair that is not afraid to show even a softer side.
L’articolo Good Boy, the review: a love letter to tyranny proviene da Dituttounpop.it.
