Review: A kidnapped brute finds the tables turned in 'Heel'

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The movie is called “Heel” and its frenetic opening — a flash-cut glimpse of young, handsome, swaggeringly cruel Tommy (Anson Boon) in drug-fueled party mode — seems enough to explain the title.The next time we see him, though, he’s neck-shackled in the basement of a remote English estate.

What follows in Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa’s blackly comic, unnerving thriller is clearly meant to evoke “Heel’s” more obedience-minded reading.And who would be harshing this hooligan’s buzz with a case of reform-minded abduction? An eerily isolated, rules-driven nuclear family: mild-mannered, soft-spoken Chris (Stephen Graham), haunted Catherine (Andrea Riseborough) and polite son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen).They all may as well have sprung from the combined neo-gothic conjurings of Edward Gorey and Harold Pinter.

Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving “Heel” enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.Our first glimpse of Tommy chained up, pleading to be let go, is through the eyes of a young Macedonian refugee, Katrina (Monika Frajczyk), being given a tour of the large countryside manor where she’s just been hired by Chris for twice-a-week housework.Katrina, like us, is rightly horrified but she’s in her own bind: undocumented, saved by Chris from the streets, with her signature on a confidentiality agreement and a deportation threat hanging over her.

She’s hardly in a position to do much more than accept what’s going on as a grimmer version of her own dead-end predicament.Movies We’ve mapped out 27 of the best movie theaters in L.A., from the TCL Chinese and the New Beverly to the Alamo Drafthouse and which AMC reigns in Burbank.And yet what’s readily apparent is that this weird, fragile, insular fam...