‘Heel’ Review: Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough Take Found Family to Extremes in a Pungently Creepy Kidnapping Thriller

A Freudian would go to town on Oscar-nominated "Corpus Christi" filmmaker Jan Komasa's family thriller featuring "1917" actor Anson Boon all grown up and chained up in a basement.

The movie “Heel” was formerly titled “Good Boy” in 2025 until another movie called “Good Boy” — that one about a dog trying to protect his beloved owner from malevolent forces — forced a name change but compelled just as much genre acclaim. The latest film from Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa follows a 19-year-old degenerate raver from London who, in the last gasp of an all-time bender, is kidnapped by Stephen Graham and chained up in the basement of a posh estate. It’s also about a troubled young man en route to redemption, not unlike Komasa’s Oscar-nominated film from 2020 “Corpus Christi.”

The why behind the kidnapping is teased with somewhat overplayed narrative breadcrumbs throughout this 110-minute movie that has the spirit of Greek New Wave cinema (from Yorgos Lanthimos to the metastasizing family toxicity of an early days entry like “Miss Violence,” which you should absolutely seek out if you want to feel really sick). Yet “Heel” could’ve benefited from the economy of filmmaking usually seen from that collective; a snippier edit would’ve really helped tighten the noose — excuse me, collar. “Anniversary” director Komasa, though, brings enough visual polish to the material to keep you in the palm of his hand.

The reasoning behind Tommy’s (Anson Boon, in a strong breakout performance from the once-younger “1917” actor) captivity in a stranger’s dank cellar, where meant-to-be-soothing nature sounds blare from a boombox but grow tantamount to dripping water torture, turns out to be fairly standard, plucked from your basic family-trauma rosebush. But where “Heel” is most unexpected is in the complex tangle of feelings that take form between the reedy, urchin-like Tommy (whom it turns out comes from a rather stable middle-class home) and his “found family,” i.e., captors, played by Graham and an always freaky Andrea Riseborough.

Tommy is a party animal with a penchant for oversharing on social media — and overdoing it not only on drugs and alcohol but in the pain he wants to inflict on others. He careens through London’s nightlife in a blackout stupor early in the film, only to awake in a basement belonging to Chris (Graham, in a totally different and creepy mode compared to “Adolescence”) and Kathryn (Riseborough, shellshocked by past scars, but with eventually more agency than you’d expect), whom her husband keeps calling “princess.” They won’t tell Tommy why he’s there, but any willfulness is met with a firm beating and Chris putting him down, saying “bad boy, bad boy, bad boy” as he pelts him with a billy club.

They also have a small son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), who offers Tommy the only shred of humanity of the lot. Inevitably “tamed,” or at least calmed down, Chris allows Tommy to live more freely in the upstairs quarters, with the dog collar and chains around his neck outfitted to an elaborate pulley system on the ceilings. They surprise him on his birthday with a picnic al fresco; is he actually starting to warm to these people, these people who keep a bell affixed to him at all times, or has he been brainwashed?

Once it becomes clear that Tommy is not the first victim of Chris and Kathryn’s scheme, and that family trauma might have something to do with it, he plots an escape. But what is Tommy going home to? The script, penned by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, becomes bizarrely moralistic by the end, insinuating that the debased and debauched might perhaps see their problems solved by becoming domesticated. That’s one way to read the film, anyway, other than as an entertaining kind of hostage thriller about an extremely dysfunctional family. There’s a “funny” moment when Tommy nearly chokes himself to death trying to steal a knife from a kitchen drawer while Chris and Kathryn slow-dance to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” by The Platters out on the terrace.

Graham and Riseborough are predictably strong and uniquely unsettling in roles that both play off and stretch their comfort zones. But it’s Boon as Tommy, who begins the movie as a real prick, a scallywag, and ends up a pretty sensitive chap, who arrives as something of a revelation. With any less capable actor in his shoes, he could not sell the inherent ridiculousness (and eventual cliches) of the premise and the part. You might wish “Heel” were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

Grade: B-

“Heel” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Magnolia Pictures releases it in select theaters on Friday, March 6, 2026.

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