110 minutes, now showing ★★★★☆

The story: It is a regular night of violent carousing for 19-year-old antisocial yob Tommy (Anson Boon), until he is snatched from the streets by a dysfunctional couple, Chris and Kathryn, (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough), and held captive in an isolated country pile in Yorkshire to be reformed.

Good Boy is like A Clockwork Orange (1971) spiked with the sick humour of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke (Funny Games, 1997).

The British thriller is, in fact, by Jan Komasa, a Polish director famously provocative in his own right for his moral parables, such as the Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi (2019).

Over two hours, his slyly shifting tones keep you on a knife-edge between nervous laughter and nauseous dread. You never know how the perverse story will next turn, nor where your sympathies should lie.

Tommy is a repellent character, and you trust his mild-mannered middle-aged abductor Chris to understand troubled teens because he is played by Emmy winner Graham from the Netflix hit series Adolescence (2025).

But Chris’ rehabilitation programme for making Tommy a “good boy” by chaining him in the basement, disciplining him with stun guns and forcing him to watch distressing social media clips of his hooliganism is, to say the least, unconventional.

Kathryn is a catatonic depressive and they have a chipper young son (Kit Rakusen), all the sinister-strange performances expertly sustained. New to their household is a Macedonian housekeeper (Monika Frajczyk).

Tommy’s acceptance into the family humanises him, and the collective emotional healing is genuinely moving in an equivocal ending that leaves you ever more unsettled.

Are you to endorse behaviour modification as a cure for society’s youthful ills? Or is the movie a satire condemning authoritarian control?

Hot take: Parents, don’t you be getting any ideas.