It’s still a while off until Halloween, but you won’t want to wait until the end of October to see one of Stephen Graham’s creepiest roles.
Good Boy — also sometimes known as Heel, thanks to another film with exactly the same canine name released at the same time — is directed by the Oscar-nominated Jan Komasa, and stars a menacing Graham and Andrea Riseborough, who kidnap and torture a 19-year-old lad under the guise of rehabilitating him. Mutating from psychological thriller to straight-up horror, it has the makings of a cult classic, albeit an exceedingly dark one.
A great choice for fans of Yorgos Lanthimos or the chilling Dead Man’s Shoes — still up there as one of the greatest British films of all time — The Good Boy sees the ever-excellent Graham once again utterly consumed by his character. He plays the sadistic Chris, a road-safety campaigner who decides to take action when he comes across the obnoxious Tommy (Anson Boon), who spends his time getting wasted on drugs, cheating on his girlfriend, stealing cars and boasting about it all on social media.
But any philanthropic ideas about rehabilitation soon go out of the window when Chris tasers Tommy and chains him in the basement of his mansion. Meting out punishment and abuse, he also tries to act as a father figure, wanting Tommy to join his family — wife Kathryn (Riseborough) and young son Jonathan — as part of his twisted retribution.
It’s a deviant tale that tackles morality and punishment in some truly excruciating scenes, but it was widely critically acclaimed when it was first released in the UK in November 2025. Clocking up 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said: “It’s a movie that could have been made at any time in the past 50 years, with high-concept provocations and talking points that feel like something from the age of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or Ôshima’s Max Mon Amour, or even, indeed, Skolimowski’s The Shout.” Screen Zealots, meanwhile, probably best summed it up as “wickedly strange and psychologically rich”.
The Good Boy is now available on demand on Apple TV+ (where you can watch it for free, if you sign up for the seven-day trial), as well as Prime Video and the BFI Player. You’ll never post a big sesh on the socials again — but maybe that’s the point, in which case it has had the desired effect. Give that director a nice pet on the head.