Stephen Graham is unable to put a foot wrong right now. A fact that should give The Good Boy from Signature Entertainment all the boost it needs. After sweeping the board at BAFTA with Adolescence and getting best actor for his troubles, The Good Boy feels like a genuine change of pace. Allowing this gifted performer to mine untouched areas of his psyche when playing Chris. An authority figure and family man with firm views on keeping the younger generation in line.
With a cast including the always impressive Andrea Riseborough as his wife Kathryn, this is a film that proves hard to pin down. Whether it intends to be a moral fable about the darker side of social media obsession, or a character-driven piece about the tough love lessons of old school family values, audiences may fine this film tonally uncomfortable.
Anson Boon plays the twenty-something Tommy, who endures humiliation and brutality at the hands of his family centric captors, before having some kind of epiphany. Whether he sees the errors of his ways or just knuckles under remains
unclear, but as an idea The Good Boy never lets audiences off the hook. Medieval in his methods but pure in that methodology, Chris as a character is a dialled down version of Stephen Graham, that suppresses his conventional instincts.
Image Courtesy of Signature Entertainment
Behind thick academic glasses and shrouded in a dour demeanour, Chris rarely raises his voice and implements a regime of social media shaming to recalibrate his captive. Anson Boon and Stephen Graham really own this film, and their conversations, confrontations, and ethical arguments give The Good Boy a solid foundation. One that makes audiences unavoidably voyeuristic throughout, observing their shifting power dynamic as they find their footing.
Whether this makes The Good Boy an engaging film is up for debate, but with Riseborough, Graham, and Boon on solid form, it remains intriguing stuff. The main problem is that Anson Boon has now carved a career out of playing angry young men. First as John Lydon in Danny Boyle’s Pistol on Disney+, and then for Guy Ritchie in MobLand, painting himself into a corner at the same time.
Beyond the moral and ethical implications of this film that are unevenly addressed by director Jan Komasa, The Good Boy has an ambiguous ending that also fails to tie up loose ends. The whys and wherefores of that finale is something that should hit home harder than it does, and if anything, this film will get more columns inches because of that ensemble cast than anything more profound.
Leaving The Good Boy between a rock and hard place when it comes to defining it as a social commentary piece or a dark and brooding piece of character-driven melodrama. However, what is undeniably is the commitment of this ensemble cast in making a film about an important subject that needs addressing, irrespective of the entertainment value.
The Good Boy is available on Digital HD on 4 May and DVD & Blu-ray on 1 June.