Heel (2025)
19-year-old Tommy (Anson Boon) is a good-for-nothing punk. He drinks, pops pills, and gets into more drunken brawls than Shia LaBeouf during Mardi Gras. One night while in an intoxicated stupor, Tommy is kidnapped by married couple Chris (Stephen Graham, looking unrecognizable in a toupee and eye glasses) and Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough). They chain Tommy to a wall in their basement and go about their own process of trying to rehabilitate him. The cast of characters also include the couple's young son, Jonathan (Kit Rakusen), and recently hired immigrant housekeeper, Rina (Monika Frajczyk).
As the movie Heel begins, it appears as though Rina is going to be the main character. However, she ends up only being a minor character but still a key component to the plot. Is that just clunky screenwriting or brilliant subversion? Either way, it works.
The performances are uniformly good. Graham's character can come off
as menacing and then gentle and wise. It's up to you to figure out if he's
crazy or not. Riseborough plays a woman who is clearly carrying lots of
emotional pain, and she does it through quiet acting. Finally, Boon's character
initially comes off as a complete menace. In the first half of the movie, you
do feel he is getting what he deserves. However, there is a shift in Tommy as
he seems to be becoming a better person, or is it just an act for him to make
an escape? Boon makes these shifts believable.
Heel is fashioned like a thriller but it plays like a
strange little drama. Don't get me wrong, there are moments of suspense, but
it's definitely not a horror show or even a thriller. It's kind of like a very
subdued A Clockwork Orange, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The
gloominess of the story does occasionally weigh on you, especially in the mid-section.
Still, and no pun intended, Heel is generally captivating.
