TIFF Review: “Good Boy”

Good Boy (Jan Komasa, 2025) 3½ out of 5 stars

Tommy is a problem child (young adult, really, at 19). A hard-drinking and drug-taking bully—violent and oversexed, to boot—he provides no service to the world beyond making a mess that others have to clean up. So if he were to vanish, who would miss him?

Good Boy, the new film from director Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi), opens with Tommy (Anson Boon, Blackbird) in full rager mode, popping pills, doing lines and gulping shots, then vomiting it out on the sidewalk to start again. Eventually, he ditches his mates, as well as his ostensible girlfriend, to wander off on his own, looking for the next party, and the one after that. Or for trouble. Eventually, trouble finds him.

In another part of London at another time, mild-mannered husband and father Christopher (Stephen Graham, Blitz) interviews a would-be housemaid, Rina (Monika Frajczyk, Prime Time), for a gig at his place, asking somewhat inappropriate questions about her smoking habits and possible body blemishes. As a Macedonian immigrant, she’s in fairly desperate need of work, however, and so accepts the position. Cut to her arrival at Christopher’s well-apportioned and remote country manor.

There, she meets his depressed wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough, Here Before), and son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen, Consecration). And then, on that first day of work, she also meets Tommy, who is chained in the basement. Apparently, neither Christopher nor the movie are quite what she, and we, expected.

They make a decidedly odd trio, this father-mother-son family, quite lonely and often psychopathic, yet also motivated by a sense of justice. Christopher has imprisoned Tommy to reform him, forcing him at times to watch social-media posts of his very dirty deeds. He is a bad boy.

Part of the appeal of Good Boy is how much we are made to dislike Tommy (he’s pretty despicable) yet also sympathize with him over his plight. Christopher and Kathryn are also both very creepy and chillingly dispassionate in how they mete out punishment. It’s hard to wish their brand of makeover on anyone.

Slowly, the narrative grows more complicated, the boundaries between forced conduct and true transformation blurring over time. As Tommy gains more freedom, we see him appear to genuinely take to heart the reprimands over his past wrongdoing. But he simultaneously keeps looking for a way out (who can blame him?).

Meanwhile, Rina is still around, and her eventual fate adds another wrinkle to the drama. I’m not convinced that we need her character for the rest to work, but her presence allows for additional notes to surface in the behavior of everyone else. Plus, what happens to her paves the way for the eventual final act.

I won’t give any plot spoilers beyond the above, but Good Boy pleasantly surprises in the way it spins out its story threads. There is more to Tommy than we originally thought, and more to the movie, too. Some of it strains credulity, all of it holds our attention.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.