Polish director Jan Komasa is emerging as a serious talent worth watching. With **HEEL**, we are given something that initially recalls **A CLOCKWORK ORANGE**, but gradually feels closer to a folk-horror variation on **THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE** — a psychological tale of confinement, forced rehabilitation, and a very bad boy being coerced into becoming good.
Before we get there, however, **HEEL** opens with what feels like 15 different production-company logos flashing across the screen — an unintentionally hilarious parade that starts to resemble a **FAMILY GUY** gag before the actual movie finally begins. But once the film gets going, it grabs ahold of you and rarely loosens its grip.
Local Yorkshire droog Tommy (played by Anson Boon) is addicted to booze, drugs, sex and violence — wreaking havoc wherever he goes in a whirlwind of debauchery. Like a music video from The Prodigy, Tommy snorts, glugs, and rages aimlessly through life until one fateful evening when, in a drunken stupor, he is separated from his pals after collapsing unconscious in the street.
When Tommy awakes, he discovers himself chained like a dog to a dingy mattress in the cellar of a Yorkshire farmhouse, tended to by Chris (Stephen Graham).
We sense sinister motives behind the kidnapping — though it's hard to feel an ounce of sympathy for the loathsome Tommy — as Chris makes his intentions clear: Tommy will be "corrected" until he can be reformed and welcomed into their family as an older brother to their son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), and a son to his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough).
Nursing a recent tragedy, Chris, Kathryn and son Jonathan — each broken in their own way — have constructed an unsettling domestic fantasy in which Tommy isn't merely their prisoner, but a replacement piece intended to fill a void that grief has left behind.
Not one to buckle easily, Tommy puts up one hell of a fight, rebelling against his incarceration with abusive language and a torrent of threats that underscore the sheer improbability of this twisted *Pygmalion* experiment. The harder Chris attempts to hammer Tommy into the shape of a civilized human being, the more apparent it becomes that this bizarre rehabilitation may transform everyone involved.
But Komasa's film (written by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid) has several surprises in this psychological tale of family, trauma, acceptance and trust that begs the question: can empathy be taught to someone as wayward as Tommy?
With incredible performances by Boon, the always brilliant Graham and Riseborough, HEEL is one of the biggest surprises of the year — a disturbing and unexpectedly moving examination of damaged people attempting to repair one another through deeply damaged means. What begins as a sinister tale of captivity and forced rehabilitation gradually becomes something far more compassionate, suggesting that even in the most unlikely of people, empathy may not simply be innate — it can be learned.