Good Boy (2025) | Jan Komasa

[BluBonnet]

This is not to be confused with the dog movie with the same name.

Oscar-Nominated Director Jan Komasa on Dark, Twisted Toronto Premiere ‘Good Boy,’ Starring ‘Adolescence’s’ Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough

“Adolescence” star Stephen Graham, Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough (“To Leslie”) and Anson Boon (“1917”) lead the twisted thriller “Good Boy,” the English-language debut from Academy Award nominee Jan Komasa (“Corpus Christi”), which premieres Sept. 6 in the Centrepiece strand of the Toronto Intl. Film Festival.

The film stars Boon as Tommy, a 19-year-old hooligan who wakes up from an all-night bender in the basement of a strange suburban home, bound with a chain around his neck. Soon he learn that he’s being held by well-to-do Chris (Graham) and his neurotic wife Kathryn (Riseborough), a dysfunctional couple whose project of forced rehabilitation is designed to turn wild-child Tommy into a “good boy.”

Based off a script by newcomer Bartek Bartosik, along with British writer and filmmaker Naqqash Khalid (“In Camera”), the film marks a departure for Komasa, a prolific director whose credits include the button-pushing thriller “Suicide Room” and the subversive, slow-burn drama “Corpus Christi.”

“With everything I’ve done, I have never been in the area of the absurd,” the director tells Variety. Describing Good Boy” as “a thought-provoking mix of genres,” he adds: “Maybe it’s a one-off. Or maybe it changed my DNA and opened up something new. I don’t know.”

“Good Boy” is produced by Jeremy Thomas (“The Last Emperor”), Ewa Piaskowska (“Essential Killing”) and Jerzy Skolimowski (“EO”), the legendary Polish filmmaker who Komasa describes as a “role model” and cites as the driving force that got his latest project off the ground.

It was Skolimowski who approached Komasa with the script for “Good Boy” back in 2019, while the director was in L.A. during the Oscar campaign for “Corpus Christi.” Komasa says he was immediately drawn to the off-kilter story about a bad boy’s “detoxication from trash culture,” finding something familiar and characteristically “Central and Eastern European” in its “bitter, dark sense of humor dwelling in moral gray [areas].”

“I was thrilled. I was shaking. I loved it,” he says. Once he read the script, he adds, he couldn’t put it down.

Originally written in Polish and set in the world of Warsaw football hooligans, the film was adapted to an English setting to make it more universally appealing, according to the director. It was filmed in Warsaw and Yorkshire, England, not far from where Emily Brontë wrote “Wuthering Heights,” though “Good Boy” offers a decidedly different take on the tale of a young man taken in by a well-off landed family.

“The whole arc is infused with this study of moral grays and what changes if you make one decision over the other,” Komasa says. “What happens to your soul? Or do we even have a soul? Where are we? Where does the human begin and end?”

Though “Good Boy” marks the first English-language feature by the Polish director to hit the screen, it was actually shot on the heels of another, “Anniversary,” a thriller starring Dylan O’Brien, Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler that will be released by Lionsgate this October.

While it might be tempting to view the career moves as a step up from the world of auteur-driven Polish cinema, Komasa insists that they’re just a symptom of his restless energy, “knowing and presuming that not everything I do will find its way to the screen.”

“I treat English-language films as just another field in which I can look around and find something interesting to share with viewers,” he says. “I don’t treat it as the next step in the ladder. I feel like a tourist with a backpack. I’m just running around, excited to be discovering new energies and ideas.”