Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough Thriller

The premise of Good Boy, the new drama-dark-comedy-thriller by Corpus Christi helmer Jan Komasa, is certainly provocative.

A young hoodlum, Tommy (Anson Boon), is snatched off the streets of London one night, and wakes up chained in the basement of a family man, Chris (Stephen Graham), who intends to rehabilitate him. Initially, Tommy resists, as anyone might. But his feelings about his predicament grow more complicated the longer he’s in Chris’ charge.

If the concept has a way of grabbing one’s attention, however, the execution proves too uneven to leave a lasting impression. Though Good Boy gets by for a while on the strength of its performances and the sheer oddness of its plot, the flimsiness of its characters drains the film of energy long before its 110 minutes are up.

At first, Good Boy has the trappings of horror. The room Tommy is imprisoned in is one of those grimy, queasily lit cellars especially beloved by cinematic serial killers, and located beneath a sprawling countryside home with no neighbors around for miles. His captor, Chris, fits the trope of the monster hiding in plain sight. He might appear meek at first glance, with his lumpy sweater vest and mousy toupee, but his hulking shoulders, meaty hands and tendency to ask unsettling questions about “distinguishing marks,” of the sort that might be used to ID a dead body, all serve as implicit threats.

Chris is the attentive husband to Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), a figure so gaunt and pale she seems almost more a ghost than a living woman. Their son is Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), whose milk-fed sunniness seems both like a welcome oasis in all this gloom and a suspicious anomaly. (Is he perhaps too chipper?) Rounding out the unhappy home — two times a week, anyway — is Rina (Monika Frajczyk), an undocumented Macedonian housekeeper who’s been half-persuaded and half-threatened by Chris into taking the job despite her horror at seeing Tommy trapped in the basement.

It’s clear from Kathryn and Jonathan’s reactions to Chris’ actions — concerned or curious but hardly shocked — that this is not the first time this clan have found themselves in a situation like this. But if you’re waiting for details on who these people are or why they’re doing this or what exactly happened last time, Good Boy deliver only vague clues. Nor does the script (written by Bartek Bartosik and co-written by Naqqash Khalid) offer much explanation of who Tommy was before all of this, beyond just another screw-up with a seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs, sex and violence.

Good Boy aims for something less specific and more universal, turning its torture-porn-ready concept into a watered-down thought exercise about our conflicting desires for freedom and security, care and independence. Tommy repeatedly describes his ordeal as “torture,” which it is. But he also betrays a flicker of hurt when Chris comments on how “impressive” it is that he’s “managed to aimlessly float through [his] whole life unnoticed,” and what little we see of Chris’ home life suggests emotional neglect. If total obedience is the price he pays for an authority figure who actually cares enough to get him the glasses he didn’t even know he needed, well, maybe you can see why a boy might be intrigued.

On the flip side, while the film does not overtly evoke current politics — striving, instead, to tap into urges more primal than adherence to some party line — it’s hard not to read a reactionary conservatism into Chris. At one point, he has the gall to demand an apology from Tommy for lashing out at Kathryn. When Tommy incredulously points out that he’s the victim here, Chris clucks like a dad who’s not mad, just disappointed. “That’s the problem with your generation,” he says. “You always tend to gravitate toward some kind of victimhood.”

It’s one of Good Boy’s most darkly funny punchlines, if also an obvious one, and it speaks volumes about Chris’ worldview. To his eye, Tommy’s breach of the unspoken social contract by which we do not fling our soiled bedclothes at people’s genteel upper-middle-class wives is a far greater sin than his own theft of Tommy’s dignity and liberty.

The issue is that if the impulses behind these choices are recognizable in theory, the characters themselves are broad to the point of abstraction. The cast does what they can to flesh them out. As Chris, an apparently mild man with a disturbingly rigid core, Graham does an interesting 180 from his stellar work in Adolescence, in which he played a tough man with a shattered heart. Riseborough can command the screen just by standing still in the background, though even her chameleonic talents cannot make a coherent whole out of Kathryn’s drastic transformations. And while Boon isn’t straying terribly far from his troubled young men in FX’s Pistol and Paramount+’s MobLand, there’s a reason he keeps winding up in these roles — he wears them very, very convincingly.

But to the end, they’re not so much people as they are archetypal figures: the father figure willing to dole out tough love, the mother who blossoms only as a caretaker and the innocent child in danger of corruption, with Tommy as the prodigal son in need of discipline — or, perhaps, the feral cur who secretly yearns to be tamed. Though he objects that he’s “not just some dog you can take in,” the film’s title (not to be confused with the other Good Boy, which actually is a canine horror movie), as well as the sight of Tommy in a metal collar and leash, makes the comparison unavoidable.

These are not individuals we might recognize from our own lives, or see ourselves in, or even feel for as one might an alien character so layered and nuanced that they nevertheless start to feel real. While the situation Tommy and Chris and Kathryn find themselves in is peculiar enough that one might keep watching just to see where it goes, there’s no sense that disturbing or destructive or tragic choices they make might be ones we ourselves might consider under extreme circumstances. Without that grounding, Good Boy lacks the edge that might make its outré narrative seem truly dangerous. It ends up all bark, and no bite.