A demented cautionary tale about current adolescents, led by the star of the hit mini-series Adolescence, director Jan Komasa’s Heel couldn’t be more stylistically different from the Netflix award-winner if it tried. A dark-comedy-horror-psycho-chamber-piece, it bites off a lot, and in the infamous words of Will Smith, proceeds to chew it. Whether the audience will find it digestible remains to be seen, but it’s certainly an unabashedly gutsy cinematic experiment, led by a cast of pros that elevate it above a mere curiosity.
After a record-breaking two-and-a-half minutes of opening company logos, Komasa, along with his screenwriters Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, thrust us right into the plot. Young Tommy (Anson Boon) is unhinged; he parties, does hard drugs, gets into fights, and has reckless sex. “I’m the king!” he announces early on, before getting kidnapped by the wig-sporting Chris (Stephen Graham) and his ghostly wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough).
Tommy finds himself chained in the basement, “calming” jungle noises blasting in his ears, subject to the psychotic couple’s “rehabilitation program”. It’s not just them: their traumatized son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), also inhabits the gothic-like mansion, as does the recently hired, freaked-out maid Rina (Monika Frajczyk), who’s bound to the fuc*ked-up family via her questionable visa status.
The rehab involves Tommy having to watch viral videos of him committing violent crimes, as well as an old-school deprogramming series. Tommy thrashes and threatens and attacks at every opportunity, until Chris teaches him a lesson (“Bad boy, bad boy!”). As Tommy learns to live by the rules, the psycho duo widens his perimeter of roaming in the house. “Trust us, it’s a process,” Kathryn says. “You make us so proud.” Secrets unravel — there’s a special room that used to belong to a crucial someone — and things escalate until a head-scratching finale that stretches credulity.
“…finds himself chained in the basement…”
“We are a zero-waste household,” Chris tells a petrified Rina. He gives her tasers for protection: “Tommy’s going through a rebellious phase.” Their family movie night is wildly unconventional at best. They chloroform Tommy on his birthday to take him out (“Smells wonderfully sweet, doesn’t it?”). When Jonathan gets caught smoking and consequently lying about it, his punishment may be the knuckle-whitening highlight of the film. It’s all perfectly awkward, disturbing, creepy, and pitch-black hilarious.
But underneath all the layers of insanity, there’s real truth here. Grief. Redemption. The perils of parenthood. The effect of social media on contemporary youth. It’s not all fully explored or coherently stitched together, but the themes still manage to peek through the thickly-layered eccentricities, and even resonate.
The performances truly carry the film. Stephen Graham yet again plays a grieving father, desperate to set a young man on the right path, but his approach here is a pitch-perfect calibration of menace and care. Riseborough is fantastic: deceptively resigned, delegated to her bedroom, the soft-spoken voice of cruel reason. And Anson Boon is a force of nature, embodying a teenager whose cruelties have been amplified into unspeakable acts by social media — and then believably transitioning to a likable bloke.
A tad overlong, a bit too highfalutin, Heel still grips, enthralls, and amuses. I’d much rather see a film that stumbles while reaching for greatness than one that glides smoothly through 90 minutes of mediocrity. Good boy, Komasa. Now let’s see what you’ve got next.
"…there’s real truth here..."
