Good Boy

CinemaSerf

“Tommy” (Anson Boon) is an odious cretin of a teenager who bullies, boozes and snorts his way through life until one night he finds himself all alone and somewhat the worse for wear. Next morning, we meet “Rina” (Monika Frajczyk) who has arrived at a remote country house where she is rather perfunctorily interviewed for a cleaning job by “Christopher” (Stephen Graham). On her subsequent tour of their home she is introduced to his borderline catatonic wife “Catherine” (Andrea Riseborough) and their son “Jonathan” (Kit Rakusen) before being taken downstairs to the basement and encountering a lad who is chained to the wall. Yep, that’s our “Tommy” - just as foul mouthed and threatening as before, only now he’s a bit more sober. Oddly enough, that doesn’t scare off “Rina” and so we know that she must have problems of her own as we now follow quite a menacingly bizarre process of what could be called rehabilitation for the angry young man, and possibly for others too. What I did enjoy here was the powerfully charismatic effort from a Boon who genuinely came across as obnoxious as we start out but who becomes someone altogether more shrewd as the dynamics in the house change in a series of quite unexpected ways. Just watch his eyes! Riseborough is also on solid form as her persona deceives effectively and with about half an hour left it’s fairly safe to say that I hadn’t really much of a clue what was going to happen to whom at the end. Stockholm syndrome maybe? Faux-Stockholm syndrome maybe? Watch and see, it’s worth it and I expect to see a lot more of Anson Boon.