Of the three movies releasing in 2025 that share the name Good Boy, director Jan Komasa’s may be the strangest. Anson Boon stars as Tommy, a 19-year-old who spends nights out harᴀssing strangers, using bus stops as bathrooms, and ingesting as many drugs as he possibly can. During the fateful night that kicks off the film, Tommy is snatched off the streets, the camera crashing towards him as he stumbles drunkenly home.

When he wakes up, Tommy finds himself with a thick metal collar attached by chain to the ceiling of a dingy basement in the British countryside. At this point, Good Boy could go in various directions, and it flirts with genre as often as Tommy flirts with girls at the clubs he frequents. What’s most surprising about this film, though, is its insistence on not being one thing, shifting between domestic drama and kidnap thriller.

Good Boy Is A Slippery & Frustrating Thriller

Tommy’s kidnapper, Chris (Stephen Graham in a chillingly affable role), is the patriarch of a fractured family, his wife Katherine (Andrea Riseborough) practically catatonic, as pale as a ghost haunting the country manor they live in. Their son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) is creepily cheerful, his reaction to Tommy’s presence only adding to the surrealism of the situation.

Their goal in kidnapping Tommy seems to be two-pronged: they wish to rehabilitate him, but they are also hoping to rebuild a family dynamic that has been lost. Of course, this all hinges on Tommy’s cooperation — whether he even wants to be a better person remains an open question throughout much of Good Boy.

Chris often forces Tommy to watch old videos of himself where he steals cars and torments strangers, verbally and physically abusing people for no other reason than the fact that they were around. Good Boy is frustratingly elusive, though, avoiding explanation for many of its mysteries and treading too lightly when it comes to thematic concerns. We don’t find out why Chris has been stalking Tommy for seemingly quite some time, nor do we really understand who Tommy is.

There are vague gestures towards an absent father and an uncaring mother, but Good Boy doesn’t try to over-explain Tommy’s bad behavior. Sometimes people are just bad. That doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of change, but often, extreme circumstances force them to reckon with the change they’ve been avoiding. Rock bottom can look like a lot of things and, for Tommy, it seems like he’s practically there even before he’s kidnapped.

But, it turns out that Tommy’s rock bottom is actually the basement of a well-meaning, but psycH๏τic man in an unconvincing wig. When Good Boy finally decides to wrestle with the ideas at its core, it touches on them only briefly. In a way, Chris and Katherine are providing everything Tommy appears to lack — safety and security, love and tenderness. But when these things are being forced upon you, does it really count?

And, with Good Boy only nodding towards these ideas and the depth of these characters, their efforts ring hollow. Rounding out these dynamics is Rina (Monika Frajczyk), a hired housekeeper and undocumented immigrant from Macedonia whose sole purpose in the film seems to be to provide Tommy with a key piece of information in the third act. It’s a confounding element that only adds a sense of confusion to Good Boy, putting into stark question its ultimate goals.

There is hardly enough room in Good Boy for a meditation on the state of immigration in the United Kingdom, let alone the rest of the ideas the film is wrestling with. Thankfully, Boon, Graham, and Riseborough do enough to anchor the film and bring it home as it lands on a strangely poignant note both chilling and endearing.

Good Boy premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.