‘Heel’ Review: Jan Komasa’s Funny and Disturbing Thriller About the Fixing of a Bad Bloke

Jan Komasa’s Heel thrusts us into a whirlwind of debauchery with its opening sequence, all loud music and aggressive editing. Before we even see him knock back one drink after another and do lines of coke, we know that 19-year-old Tommy (Anson Boon) is used to being the boss. He certainly bounds down the street like he owns the place, and he doesn’t pause before sucker-punching a bouncer in the face. He’s a public menace, and he would clearly benefit from some soul searching or a general attitude adjustment.

By the end of Heel, Tommy will have undergone a transformation, though not of his volition. His wild night ends with him being attacked in the street as he drunkenly ambles home and waking up with a metal collar around his neck in the cellar of a country house owned by a dysfunctional couple, Chris (Stephen Graham) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), determined to set him on the straight and narrow. From that premise, the filmmakers basically go about imagining what a Pretty Woman or My Fair Lady would look like if it had teeth.

Chris is Tommy’s primary point of contact. With his oversized glasses, carefully combed wig, and slumped shoulders, the man is hardly the picture of a brute. Something certainly seems off about him, but he doesn’t come across like a violent sadist, which is perhaps why Macedonian immigrant Rina (Monika Frajczyk) agrees to work as the family’s housekeeper, despite the questions that he asks during her job interview raising more than a few red flags.

Another film might have delighted in Chris’s machinations, or his efforts to conceal Tommy from Rina or his wife and precocious son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). In fact, Tommy’s rehabilitation is a family affair. There’s no doubt that the young man is dehumanized, and if it weren’t bad enough that a metal collar is fitted around his neck, he isn’t given enough slack to use a bathroom downstairs and must urinate in a jug. When Tommy misbehaves egregiously, Chris beats him, calling him a “bad boy!” between blows. But you sense the turmoil in Chris’s face, and when he says he hates that it’s come to this, you believe him.

Tommy isn’t starved. He’s encouraged to read, and rather than frequent violence, he’s subjected mainly to educational videos and audio tapes that alternate between positive affirmations and soothing nature sounds. Eventually, he’s even allowed upstairs. And because it’s a thriller, Heel is powered by the suspense that at some point, surely, the jig is going to be up.

That suspense takes this alternately funny and disturbing film a very long way. Not only are they earnestly invested in Tommy’s “recovery,” the family members learn a little something about themselves along the way—about how to have fun and, by extension, live. That may sound corny, but Heel is laced with a dark humor that keeps the maudlin at bay.

In one scene, the family sits down to watch Ken Loach’s Kes, about a working-class boy who develops a life-changing relationship to a falcon. And while Tommy shares traits with that humanist masterpiece’s protagonist, a troubled working-class boy who develops a life-changing relationship to a falcon, the basic fact of his captivity means that he’s also the leashed falcon.

The film, written by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, invites us to wonder what made a family this way and what they’re capable of, providing few concrete answers about their past but showing us just how badly Jonathan shrinks from his parents’ ire, hinting at past violence and a fear that what’s happening to Tommy could very well happen to him. Or maybe it’s about something that happened to someone else. By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.