Heel

Jan Komasa made his name with provocations about Polish society: Suicide Room, the war epic Warsaw 44, the online-hate thriller The Hater and above all Corpus Christi, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature in 2020. Heel — also known as Good Boy — is his move into English-language filmmaking, a Polish–British co-production originally written for Warsaw and relocated to the north of England, with Jerzy Skolimowski among its producers. It premiered in Toronto's Centrepiece programme in 2025.

Anson Boon plays Tommy, a nineteen-year-old whose nights are a blur of cocaine, fights and filmed bravado, and who comes to in a cellar with a chain around his neck. Upstairs live Chris (Stephen Graham), his fragile wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough) and their young son, a family whose gentle routines are more unsettling than any threat. Komasa plays the premise less as horror than as a pitch-black fable about masculinity and reform, letting the comedy of domestic manners sit uneasily alongside the cruelty. Graham, soft-spoken and unreadable, is superb; Riseborough gives the film its fraying, melancholy centre, and Boon makes a feral, oddly vulnerable lead.

Critics were struck by its tonal daring and its refusal to settle into a single genre, and it drew strong reviews on its festival run through Toronto, London and Rome. It confirms Komasa as one of the few European directors whose moral provocations travel intact across languages.