Good Boy, the review of the film by Jan Komasa with Stephen Graham, Anson Boon and Andrea Riseborough

The disturbing thriller by Oscar-nominated director Jan Komasa also stars Anson Boon and Andrea Riseborough: between youth in need of re-education and dysfunctional families. In 2026 at the cinema.

The new Adolescence? Of course not, but Good Boy the film presented in competition at the Rome Film Festival and in theaters in 2026 with Minerva Pictures and Filmclub Distribuzione comes very close. The Netflix series was certainly the biggest gut punch of this year, highlighting a generation that seems to have lost the tools to distinguish right from wrong.

Constantly bombarded by stimuli and information without being able to process them correctly, in a delicate and formative age such as that of development, in which we are all more easily influenced and malleable. Something similar happens in the film by Oscar nominee Jan Komasa, in which we find Stephen Graham as the lead actor.

Good Boy: How is a “good boy” formed?

“Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll”. This is how we could summarize the typical day of Tommy (Anson Boon), a nineteen-year-old clearly angry at the world, who thinks that treating everyone badly, literally putting his feet on their heads and considering them his property is normal. After yet another evening of revelry, he wakes up in the home of an apparently kind, but in reality clearly dysfunctional, family. It is kept chained around the necklike a beast.

At that point part one forced rehabilitation to the sound of educational videos, do-it-yourself videos and shares made on social media by the boy himself about his antics, to brag about it. Perhaps the only way to make him fully understand the horror of his actions? But what about the head of the family Chris (Graham), his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their young son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen)? The film also emphasizes the horror perpetrated by the family, even if born “with good intentions and for a just cause”. Everyone is a victim and also a perpetratorand this can destabilize the viewer.

A disturbing, harsh, magnetic, contradictory film

It moves up multiple tones and genres Good Boy: From thriller to almost grotesque horror, we move on to family drama and comedy infused black humour. There is always an underlying annoyance and pain when witnessing both Tommy’s actions and those of the family that imprisons him. Such a situation paradoxical to result dramatically true: what are we willing to go to to defend our freedom and that of others?

From dry writing to regia surgical, which brings out all the facets of the characters, Jan Komasa manages to construct a story that keeps you in suspense. It’s really difficult to predict where it will go and what its epilogue will be. Jamasa, by his admission, quotes Kubrick, Hitchcock, Seurat, taking advantage of claustrophobic shots taken in interiors.

A phenomenal cast

Anson Boon is one of the most promising actors of his generation, we think so Pistol. The same goes for Stephen Graham, from his days as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire. Their meeting-clash on stage, together with that of Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough, is absolute casting miracle in which everyone gives the best of themselves, giving a complex stratification of the human soul, especially in a crisis situation. There fear it is the feeling that guides the narrative of Good Boywith ideas somewhere between brilliant and disturbing that put our concept of youth re-education to the test.

A strong message

The film wants to make us ask ourselves what we would have done in place of the protagonists; and above all what would we be willing to do to try to raise awareness among the new generations of the basics of human behavior, when everything else seems not to work. Uncomfortable questions to which Jamasa chooses not to give answers but to invite society to look in the mirror and reflect on what it has become, what it could be and what it hopes to become. Before it’s really too late.