Heel – Movie Review (4/5)

HEEL is a Thriller Drama from Polish director Jan Komasa (The Hater) that stars Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough. Originally, this movie was titled Good Boy, but it was changed for obvious reasons to avoid confusion. Fortunately, the title has remained dog-related, as this only makes sense. Anson Boon is brilliant in the lead. Read our full Heel movie review here!

HEEL is a wild ride that offers so much more than I expected. Of course, with this filmmaker and cast, I should have expected that it would pack a punch. Personally, I loved how the storyline kept evolving in ways that kept you guessing. Always showing more of each character and allowing the audience to see the bigger picture.

The runtime is 1 hour and 50 minutes, which I admittedly expected would be too long, but it really isn’t. Not at all, in fact. However, it is more slow-burn and intense than I expected. And also, quite a different beast than what the trailer made me expect, as this is much more action-packed and fast-paced. Heel is not action-driven, but it’s a genre-hybrid in all the best ways.

Continue reading our Heel movie review below. Find it In Limited Theaters and On Demand from March 6, 2026.

Tough love taken to the extreme

With Heel, we get a truly twisted thriller about a 19-year-old troubled young man. Actually, “troubled” is too nice a way to describe the hooligan Tommy (Anson Boon), who lives to party and fight. It’s a sad life full of drugs, parties, and violence. Nothing much is going on for him, so he just keeps doing this one thing where he has some semblance of an identity.

Tommy’s life takes a sharp turn when he gets separated from his group of “friends” one night. While out on a bender, he walks the streets barely still on his feet, and when he wakes up, he has been abducted by a man (Golden Globe® winner Stephen Graham).

Now, Tommy finds himself chained with a metal collar around his neck. He is in the basement of a seemingly “normal” home of a suburban family. Living here are Chris (Stephen Graham), his apparently struggling and depressed wife Kathryn (Academy Award® nominee Andrea Riseborough), and their young son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen).

Soon, it becomes apparent that the family has chained up Tommy with one goal: To reform him. They want him to change his destructive and unruly behavior, and they prefer to do this with kindness. Trying to teach him the dangers of drug use and encouraging him to read.

Why?

Well, to help Tommy lead a better life. Really, this is the point of their actions. However, there could be a deeper reason for this endeavour, which you’ll have to watch this movie to find out.

Understandable title change

Heel was originally titled Good Boy, but after the huge success of the 2025 haunted house dog-led movie with this title, it was changed. Anything else would have made it impossible to market, and really, Heel works just as well. Perhaps even better – even if that word is never uttered and “good boy” is.

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Our review of the 2025 dog horror movie here >

I am really happy this movie stayed with a dog-related title instead of going with some generic choice. In fact, I find it interesting that Heel changed its title due to the 2025 Good Boy movie, when the plot is actually closer to the 2023 Norwegian movie also titled Good Boy. Don’t worry, this is not a remake of that, but the plot is closer to it, as this latest release has nothing supernatural in the plot.

Instead, it has an absolutely brilliant cast with Stephen Graham (Bodies, Adolescence) and Andrea Riseborough (Possessor, What Remains) as the most familiar names. And yes, they are amazing, but Anson Boon was the one who took my breath away. Sure, his character is both awful and obnoxious at first, but this is exactly why he ends up in the predicament at the heart of this plot.

Watch Heel in theaters or on VOD

Heel comes from Polish director Jan Komasa, who also directed the amazing movie The Hater (2020) and the even more amazing Anniversary (2025). I gave Anniversary a top rating, and while Heel is a breathtaking movie, we are just shy of that top rating here.

The screenplay comes from Bartek Bartosik, who is a first-time Polish screenwriter, and I cannot wait to see what he does next! As co-writer on the script is Naqqash Khalid (In Camera), and the two have clearly made for strong writing collaborators. With a runtime of 110 minutes, this movie does run a little long, but it never feels too long.

According to the director’s statement, this movie began with “a thought-provoking idea I couldn’t let go”. This idea was “In a world starved for attention, is freedom still desirable if nobody sees you? Would we choose self-rule in isolation or surrender liberty for the comfort of constant care?”

I’m including this in our review simply because it’s an intriguing thought that delivers an extra layer to the plot. Not that you need it to watch the film and enjoy it, but the thought is indeed provoking, and the answer will surely differ depending on who answers it. Another quirky detail I wanted to share is that this movie was partially shot in the same studio as the first Polish edition of Big Brother, which also features people being (voluntarily) imprisoned.

Heel is out In Theaters and On Demand from March 6, 2026.

Details

Directed by: Jan Komasa
Written by: Bartek Bartosik, Naqqash Khalid
Cast: Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, & Anson Boon

Photos courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.