A kidnapped brute finds the tables turned in 'Heel'

The movie is called “Heel” and its frenetic opening — a flash-cut glimpse of young, handsome, swaggeringly cruel Tommy (Anson Boon) successful drug-fueled enactment mode — seems capable to explicate the title. The adjacent clip we spot him, though, he’s neck-shackled successful the basement of a distant English estate. What follows successful Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa’s blackly comic, unnerving thriller is intelligibly meant to evoke “Heel’s” much obedience-minded reading.

And who would beryllium harshing this hooligan’s buzz with a lawsuit of reform-minded abduction? An eerily isolated, rules-driven atomic family: mild-mannered, soft-spoken Chris (Stephen Graham), haunted Catherine (Andrea Riseborough) and polite lad Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). They each whitethorn arsenic good person sprung from the combined neo-gothic conjurings of Edward Gorey and Harold Pinter. Under Komasa’s direction, the premix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play successful Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving “Heel” capable psychologically twisted juju to astir ever consciousness similar much than the sum of its parts.

Our archetypal glimpse of Tommy chained up, pleading to beryllium fto go, is done the eyes of a young Macedonian refugee, Katrina (Monika Frajczyk), being fixed a circuit of the ample countryside manor wherever she’s conscionable been hired by Chris for twice-a-week housework. Katrina, similar us, is rightly horrified but she’s successful her ain bind: undocumented, saved by Chris from the streets, with her signature connected a confidentiality statement and a deportation menace hanging implicit her. She’s hardly successful a presumption to bash overmuch much than judge what’s going connected arsenic a grimmer mentation of her ain dead-end predicament.

And yet what’s readily evident is that this weird, fragile, insular household is genuinely keen connected folding Tommy into their lives. They’re besides convinced of their unorthodox methods, which hinge connected reinforcement and reward. Tommy seems receptive, too, with each invitation to enactment successful his abductors’ togetherness (meals, movie nights, a picnic). This is erstwhile “Heel” is astatine its astir alluringly queasy, a acheronian commentary connected each families arsenic institutions inherently built connected confinement and affectional blackmail. (It’s nary coincidence 1 of the movie’s enforcement producers is Jerzy Skolimowski, who made his ain pointed kidnapping allegory with “Moonlighting.”)

Everyone’s broken, truthful the corporate spot of the formed successful keeping america connected our toes astir wherever this is each headed is simply a immense plus. The wiry Boon doles retired his brash character’s reserves of vulnerability to stunning effect — Tommy is simply a hard portion and Boon knows however to marque it revealing and suspenseful. Graham’s tweaked, delicate patriarch is tantalizingly acold from the heartbreaking dada of “Adolescence” and the gloriously oddball Riseborough makes the astir of her faint-voiced mom’s severity. Frajczyk and Rakusen are besides pitch-perfect.

Last twelvemonth Komasa had different family-centered thriller with “Anniversary,” a movie astir authorities corrupting a blessed home. But we cognize that equation already. “Heel” is Tolstoy’s happy-family maxim cooked successful a huffy scientist’s lab. While it sometimes shows its seams arsenic an thought movie, its elegant disturbia has a boldness, recalling that large mind-game ’60s epoch that gave america “TheServant,” “The Collector,” and the aboriginal intelligence freak-outs of Komasa’s countryman, Roman Polanski.