The Good Boy, review: Stephen Graham tortures a teenage boy in his cellar in this twisted thriller

We learn that Chris is an ex-policeman and wears a tidy toupee. The couple have lost another boy in their care, which explains why Riseborough renders Kathryn suicidally adrift. Graham, softening his Scouse consonants a little, manages to cut a touchingly sympathetic figure even when doling out the grimmest of medicines to the young man they’ve imprisoned.

The half-ideas at play here suggest a Yorgos Lanthimos twist on A Clockwork Orange, but that pitch could very easily have malfunctioned in exactly the ways this film does.

The screenplay leaves a heap of questions pretentiously unanswered, and one in particular: why has Tommy been chosen, precisely? For all Boon’s talents – spent on writhing, rampaging, being ghastly beyond belief, and then convincing us of a redemption arc that Tommy could be faking – he can’t fix a third act that’s ruinously vague. This film is crying out for a point – and it should have picked one.

In cinemas now