'Heel' Review: This Isn't Your Everyday Kidnapping Family

The movie is called “Heel” and its frenetic opening, a snapshot of young, handsome and arrogantly cruel Tommy (Anson Boon) in drug-fueled party mode, seems enough to explain the title. However, the next time we see him, he is chained by the neck in the basement of a remote English estate. What follows in Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa's haunting, darkly humorous thriller is clearly meant to evoke the more obedience-oriented reading of “Heel.”

And who was going to spoil the bustle of these hooligans with a reformist kidnapping case? A disturbingly isolated, rule-governed nuclear family: mild-mannered, soft-spoken Chris (Stephen Graham), tormented Catherine (Andrea Riseborough) and polite son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). It is quite possible that they all arose from the combined neo-Gothic incantations of Edward Gorey and Harold Pinter. Under Komasa's direction, the mix of fractured fable and terrorist morality play in Bartek Bartosik's script is absurd but potent, and gives “Heel” enough psychologically twisted juju to almost always feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Our first glimpse of Tommy in chains, begging to be let go, is through the eyes of a young Macedonian refugee, Katrina (Monika Frajczyk), as she takes a tour of the large rural mansion where Chris has just hired her to do housework twice a week. Katrina, like us, is rightly horrified, but she's in her own predicament: undocumented, saved by Chris from the streets, with her signature on a confidentiality agreement and a threat of deportation hanging over her. He is hardly in a position to do much more than accept what is happening as a grimmer version of his own hopeless situation.

And yet, what's evident is that this strange, fragile, insular family is genuinely interested in including Tommy in their lives. They are also convinced of his unorthodox methods, which depend on reinforcement and reward. Tommy also seems receptive to every invitation to participate in his kidnappers' meeting (meals, movie nights, a picnic). This is when “Heel” is at its most seductively queasy, a dark commentary on all families as institutions inherently built on confinement and emotional blackmail. (It's no coincidence that one of the film's executive producers is Jerzy Skolimowski, who made his own kidnapping allegory with “Moonlighting.”)

Everyone is devastated, so the cast's collective strength in keeping us on our toes about where this is all going is a huge plus. The wiry Boon delivers his bold character's reserves of vulnerability to surprising effect: Tommy is a difficult role, and Boon knows how to make it revealing and suspenseful. Graham's sensitive, overwrought patriarch is tantalizingly far from the heartbreaking father of “Adolescent,” and the gloriously eccentric Riseborough makes the most of her weak-voiced mother's sternness. Frajczyk and Rakusen are also pitch perfect.

Last year, Komasa had another family-centered thriller with “Anniversary,” a film about politics corrupting a happy home. But we already know that equation. “Heel” is Tolstoy's maxim about the happy family cooked up in a mad scientist's laboratory. While it sometimes shows its seams as an ideas film, there's an audacity to its elegant riot, reminiscent of those great '60s-era mind games that gave us “TheServant,” “The Collector,” and the early psychological attacks of Komasa's compatriot Roman Polanski.