Good Boy is an unsettling satirical thriller, Chinese sci-fi Per Aspera Ad Astra is the ultimate trip

Good Boy (NC16)

110 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆

The story: It is a regular night of violent carousing for 19-year-old antisocial yob Tommy (Anson Boon), until he is snatched from the streets by a dysfunctional couple, Chris and Kathryn, (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough), and held captive in an isolated country pile in Yorkshire to be reformed.

Good Boy is like A Clockwork Orange (1971) spiked with the sick humour of Austrian auteur Michael Haneke (Funny Games, 1997).

The British thriller is, in fact, by Jan Komasa, a Polish director famously provocative in his own right for his moral parables, such as the Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi (2019).

Over two hours, his slyly shifting tones keep you on a knife-edge between nervous laughter and nauseous dread. You never know how the perverse story will next turn, nor where your sympathies should lie.

Tommy is a repellent character, and you trust his mild-mannered middle-aged abductor Chris to understand troubled teens because he is played by Emmy winner Graham from the Netflix hit series Adolescence (2025).

But Chris’ rehabilitation programme for making Tommy a “good boy” by chaining him in the basement, disciplining him with stun guns and forcing him to watch distressing social media clips of his hooliganism is, to say the least, unconventional.

Kathryn is a catatonic depressive and they have a chipper young son (Kit Rakusen), all the sinister-strange performances expertly sustained. New to their household is a Macedonian housekeeper (Monika Frajczyk).

Tommy’s acceptance into the family humanises him, and the collective emotional healing is genuinely moving in an equivocal ending that leaves you ever more unsettled.

Are you to endorse behaviour modification as a cure for society’s youthful ills? Or is the movie a satire condemning authoritarian control?

Hot take: Parents, don’t you be getting any ideas.

Per Aspera Ad Astra (NC16)

112 minutes, now showing
★★★☆☆

The story: In a near future, taikonauts in decades-long cryogenic sleep live out their fantasies via the virtual reality Great Dreams System. Dylan Wang stars as the system administrator alongside Victoria Song as the ship captain, the two of them teaming up to save their spacecraft and crewmates when a crisis arises during a distant agricultural mission.

Per Aspera Ad Astra is the best Chinese science-fiction extravaganza Hollywood has never made.

It is a pastiche of The Matrix (1999), Inception (2010), Passengers (2016) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) that traps Wang and Song in intricately designed nested dreamscapes.

The dreams here are equally projections of an individual’s anxieties and wish fulfilment. A rogue entity is hijacking them for nefarious purposes, and the intrepid pair must find the enemy by fighting their way through the mutable worlds. They are cyberpunk assassins in a Hong Kong crime drama, then ninja warriors in dystopia, then neon billboard images and, briefly, an ink painting.

Chinese writer-director Han Yan’s wild invention would be a fun enough role-playing game of imaginative brio and stunning effects with martial arts action, a spunky Song plus Wang in an antic performance: The matinee idol of Meteor Garden (2018) greatly charms in his feature starring debut.

But the film-maker has big ideas too, however lightly delivered, and Wang is no mere comic value.

The goodness and bravery of his heroic engineer will come to exemplify what mankind at its best is capable of, that which will redeem humanity after we have ceded every aspect of our lives – and now, even our subconscious – to AI.

Hot take: This zippy odyssey of mind-melding maximalism is the ultimate trip.