If you are a fan of the cast, check out “Heel” (2025), but consider yourself warned that the movie is not forthcoming with any answers and get comfortable with ambiguity. Tommy (Anson Boon) is part of a family that wants him to get sober, educate himself and start having a better life. The only problem they are not his family. The patriarch, Chris (Stephen Graham), kidnapped him after a wild night then chained him in their basement. Will he escape or become part of the family? “Heel” is Jan Komasa’s first English language film even though “Anniversary” (2025) was released first, but this time, he did not create the story. Cowriters Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid probably should have let Komasa contribute more because the story lost its sharpness as it winds down and does not quite know how to end other than the broadest of strokes. If you decide to watch it, after you are done, don’t rush to judgment, and you may like it more the longer that you sit with it.
“Heel” starts boldly and shows Tommy at his worst. While it is objectively wrong to kidnap anyone, the rest of the world is probably a better place because Tommy is not roaming around outside. Chris plays Tommy’s TikTok feed, and he is worse than he presents himself in real time. His verbal outbursts against Chris are probably the most appropriate use of his antisocial energy, but he soon realizes that if he plays nice, he will have more opportunities to escape. Then the lines begin to blur, and the main tension is who will get hurt when he attempts to escape. Is he like an elastic band who will snap once let loose or so worn from being held against his will that he cannot revert to his original shape and stay too slack or break?
“Heel” is intriguing because none of the characters are easy to peg. Casting directors Nina Gold and Martin Ware deserve the world for getting such a talented ensemble cast that never lets their characters become predictable and always find new ways to surprise. Boon knows how to play the heel, aka a scoundrel, but also project on his face and with the slight movement of his eyes conflicting thoughts, epiphanies of true repentance and great depth of emotion. If you watch movies, you are already familiar with Graham’s gifts. Normally Chris would be easy to dismiss as a psycho and his mild-mannered approach as a thin veneer hiding a sadistic, domineering menace, but Graham manages to make a character that could only be described as an aggressive benign totalitarianism with positive reinforcement and rewards when he behaves and brutal, inhumane treatment when he does not and to ensure continued obedience. Chris’ goal is to rehabilitate Tommy and make him a better person, and his interactions with Katrina or Rina (Monica Frajczyk) reflect a puzzling ethical inner world. He has no problem being controlling and invasive but also has a moral code regarding which lines he will not cross.
If you expect to find out why Chris took him or how he got on Chris’ radar, prepare to be disappointed. The movie is focused on who the characters are in the moment, how they change each other and what they decide to do. There are allusions to the family’s past, but not a complete story. “Heel” is engrossing because the viewer does not have a map to how this family functions, and what the rules are so the entire movie is about playing detective. Who is a captive and who is complicit? Andrea Riseborough plays Kathryn, the family matriarch, who is sleepwalking through life and has more in common with a ghost. Kathryn adds to the Gothic nature of this story, and she knows what is going on. The longer that Tommy stays, the more she comes to life and answers are soon forthcoming starting with a bathroom scene. Kit Rakusen as the unambiguous innocent son, Jonathan, gives a magnificent performance in every scene with just his line delivery and body language alternating between normal kid behavior, undeniable distress and overeager, strained excitement. He never questions why an adult is chained in their house. He is starved for new human interactions. There is a brilliant scene where Chris alternates between teaching Jonathan and Tommy.
“Heel” raises important questions about how we define family and freedom and the role that violence plays. How much violence, physical or mental, are we willing to accept in exchange for what service? Why does family get a pass for committing acts that would get a stranger arrested? Frajczyk’s depiction of Rina is heartbreaking because her acceptance of dysfunctional systems reveals how much worse others are. My kingdom for closed captioning in her final onscreen appearance, which feels crucial to understanding the central themes of the story but unfortunately is elusive between the accents and low talking.
A heel is a command that people give to dogs to get them to obey, but in the context of this story, all the characters are trained to follow certain commands. It has often been a part of the collective imagination that if a parent just chained up a wayward child, everything would be fine, or it would be a sign of why the child went wrong in the first place. While that is the jumping off point, “Heel” clearly does not seem to be advocating for this approach but observing the deficits in freedom which may have contributed to his libertine, loutish ways. If Bartosik and Khalid have a blind spot, it is how women are consistently revealed to be the cause and solution to all of life’s joys and woes.
“Heel” feels like a more sedate, genteel “Dogtooth” (2009) without the incest. The central problem is not the kidnapping and confinement. It is the lack of long-term sustainability. Here is where the resolution feels pat and will likely lose a lot of people if they could hang on. It implies that Tommy’s antisocial behavior is like a convenient contagion that infects those around him and solves all of Tommy’s problems. A single person becomes the solution. Seriously, when a movie ends, do the writers think about how the rest of the story unfolds once the credits roll? For anything to work, on some level, the audience must leave the theater believing in what they saw, not because it could happen in the real world, but because it makes sense in the shared imagination that is occupied for the duration of the film, and it just does not.
Komasa does his thing and once again, makes a single, stately location multifaceted and fascinating as a microcosm of society. As Tommy gets more freedom in confinement, Komasa visually catalogues that parts of the house get visibly and jaggedly broken suggesting that Tommy is changing his environment and captors as much as they are changing him. Hopefully at the end, it will lead to viewers reflecting on how much are they like each character and how they compromise for their definition of happiness. “Heel” is a solid movie with perfect ingredients, but the story needed tightening and perhaps elicited more experienced screenwriter’s feedback.
