Heel

The cast alone should have made this a no-brainer. Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, two of the most reliably electric performers working in British cinema today, playing a dysfunctional couple who kidnap a delinquent teenager and lock him in their basement to "rehabilitate" him. Anson Boon as the feral, volatile Tommy. The premise is deranged in the best possible way, and for stretches, Heel absolutely delivers on that promise.

But somewhere in the middle, it loses its nerve.

Jan Komasa, working in English for the first time after the brilliant Corpus Christi, sets up a genuinely unsettling domestic nightmare. Tommy wakes chained in a Yorkshire basement, and what follows is less a thriller than a twisted study in coercion, power, and what we tell ourselves about fixing broken people. The film is at its best when it leans into that moral rot, forcing you to sit with the discomfort of a premise that is, when you really think about it, essentially rooting for Stockholm syndrome to work. That is a bold and strange thing to attempt, and to Komasa's credit, he does not flinch from it.

The performances are fine. Graham brings his usual intensity to Chris, and Riseborough does what she can with Kathryn, but neither feels fully unleashed. Boon is serviceable as Tommy without being particularly memorable. You watch all three and think: these people have done better work, and this film is not quite demanding enough of them.

Where it falls apart

The problem is the film around them. Subplots do not fully develop. The housemaid character arrives with her own storyline that feels grafted on, an interesting juxtaposition the screenplay sets up but never earns. There are unanswered questions about the family's past that feel less like deliberate ambiguity and more like gaps the writers could not fill. And the ending, after all that carefully constructed tension, does not quite land. You leave thinking about what it could have been rather than what it was.

That is the particular frustration of Heel. It is not a bad film. It is a film with a genuinely provocative concept and a director with real craft, let down by a script that leaves too many threads loose and performances that never quite catch fire. It adds up to something watchable but forgettable, which for a cast this good, feels like a missed opportunity.