In his English language debut, The Good Boy (2025), Jan Komasa follows in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) with a story of re-education and social conditioning for the twenty-first century. Released in UK cinemas last week, the film provides a deeply ironic look at nurturing, holistic modes of parenting.

Nineteen-year-old Tommy (Anson Boon) is a criminal and a bully. He assaults a bouncer, steals and wrecks a car and, most horrifyingly, stubs a cigarette out on a younger boy’s face, all the while filming his escapades for social media content. One night, after a cocaine and beer-fuelled bender, he is scooped off the street and into a car by a mysterious figure. The next time we see him, Tommy is chained by the neck in the basement of an upmarket house in the Yorkshire Dales. The house belongs to Chris and Kathryn (Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough) who live there with their young son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen) and swiftly take on the task of reconditioning Tommy.

With a somewhat retrograde parenting style that eschews most aspects of the twenty-first century, they attempt to transform him into a gentle, moral and respectable member of their family. While the method of re-conditioning in Kubrick’s film, the famous Ludovico technique, aims to transform its subject by causing physical aversion to anti-social behaviour, Chris and Kathryn’s method rests on sensitivity, warmth and understanding. They expose Tommy to classical music, literature and film, preaching the virtues of self-improvement and using rewards for good behaviour. However, despite their attitudes of encouragement and beneficence, all their overtures to Tommy are delivered within the context of extreme coercion and violence. Though Chris and Kathryn’s efforts appear to bear fruit, the film reveals an undercurrent of control that runs through bourgeois ideals.

Komasa’s film pits the nurturing parenting styles of the late twentieth century against a contemporary youth culture defined by a dopamine-chasing attention deficit. The film reproduces and adapts earlier anxieties around the horror genre such as the 1950s Comics Campaign and the ‘video nasties’ debates of the 1980s, but here reframes them as worries about the influence of social media. While the film certainly seems to subscribe to some of these worries, it also skewers theories of permissive parenting, self-improvement and holistic education as methods of countering them.