In last year’s Adolescence, Stephen Graham played a deeply troubled father struggling to figure out how to deal with his wayward son. In that feted Netflix series, Graham’s Eddie Miller ultimately, admirably, led with love, communication, and understanding to hold his family together. In The Good Boy (or Heel, US readers), Corpus Christi director Jan Komasa’s latest, Graham plays a deeply troubled father dealing with somebody else’s wayward son… and let’s just say there’s less sympathetic vibes emanating from our man Graham here as he *checks notes* abducts an unruly hooligan and chains him up in a basement. Check out the trailer:
And we thought Graham and Andrea Riseborough’s parenting was a bit sketchy in Matilda The Musical: Mr and Mrs Wormwood ain’t got nothin’ on culty Chris (Graham) and his wife Kathryn (Riseborough). Hell, even Ma might find herself asking what’s going on here as Komasa’s movie introduces us to Chris, Kathryn, and their kid Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), whose eerily quiet suburban home finds itself a new lodger when Chris kidnaps 19-year-old misfit teen Tommy (Anson Boon). “It’s quite impressive really, how you’ve managed to aimlessly float through your whole life completely unnoticed,” calmly says Graham’s Chris as he and his wife show Tommy fuzzy VHS footage of his hedonistic pursuits. “We treat each other with respect,” he continues, before laying into the lad with a truncheon and repeatedly calling him “bad boy”. But it’s all okay though, because Chris does say he’s not a psychopath, despite the aforementioned truncheon, and the chains, and the basement, and the chloroforming, and the kidnapping…
According to the official synopsis for The Good Boy, which looks to be an unholy x-meets-y of Saw and Supernanny, Chris and his clan “set out to reform Tommy’s unruly behavior, forcing him to comply with their relentless mind games or seek escape at any cost.” We’ll find out precisely what those mind games are, and what that cost may be, when The Good Boy hits cinemas in UK and Ireland on 20 March.