It has long been said that animals, especially dogs, are a cinematic cheat code. You can have a fairly run-of-the-mill story to tell, but stick a pooch in there and you have immediate emotional engagement. This is true of any movie, but it’s especially true of Good Boy, since here the dog isn’t just a supporting attraction but the literal protagonist.
How has nobody thought of this before? It’s one of those kick-yourself ideas that seem obvious in hindsight. In a genre where nobody cares about the characters because they’re always disposable idiots, why not up the stakes by casting someone everyone will root for? And it makes sense on another level, too, since dogs are acutely sensitive to danger and threats; they can sniff out cancer and cocaine and, it turns out, the paranormal. So, of course, Good Boy is a horror movie, a haunted house story from a four-legged perspective.
And I’ll say this – it’s better than a lot of efforts to reinvigorate a genre by playing with perspective. I’m thinking particularly of Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, a slasher told from the perspective of the killer, which consisted of a few memorable murders strung together by laconic jaunts through the woods. Truth be told, though, I don’t know if it’s better objectively or because there’s a dog in it. The lines are blurry.
What seems true of both movies is that a great idea isn’t always enough to sustain a feature-length runtime. Good Boy runs for 72 minutes, which feels like nothing, but it still becomes slightly repetitive, in part because of some deliberate storytelling choices, but also because how far can you really take this idea without making it feel silly? The dog, Indy, the real-life pet of director Ben Leonberg, isn’t cast as some kind of cartoon hero, but a plausible canine witnessing the worsening spiral of his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), after moving with him to his grandfather’s remote cabin after a vague health event.
The cabin is haunted – it isn’t a spoiler to share that. But what it’s haunted by remains a point of some contention even at the end, which is the only time the extremely low-budget film bites off more than it can chew visually. Todd is ill in some odd, undefined way that could be mistaken for demonic possession, and it’s made clear through VHS home movies that often play in the background that his grandfather was similarly afflicted. The longer he stays in the cabin, the worse he gets, the stranger his behaviour becomes, and the more confused Indy becomes by it. The movie isn’t about his saving the day, but about him trying to remain loyal even as Todd’s alarming deterioration threatens them both.
Never leaving Indy’s perspective is both the movie’s most brilliant trick and the source of its most pernicious problem. Todd’s face is almost never seen; we often glimpse only his legs and abdomen, as Indy does, and while Indy often senses weirdness and danger, he lacks the capacity to rationalise what’s happening to his owner. As a result, he tries to remain by Todd’s side even when it’s ill-advised, tries to parse the sudden changes with adorable little head tilts and ear twitches. The fact that he can’t do anything about what’s happening positions Indy as an extremely vulnerable bystander whom you’ll unavoidably care about immediately and deeply.
But the fact that he can’t do anything about it means that we’re essentially watching a movie from the perspective of a lovely and obviously very intelligent retriever who is also, on some level, watching the same movie. Indy’s a bystander to the film’s events. He’s surprisingly expressive, but he can’t speak or do much beyond trotting around and peering into the darkness at some lurking weirdness, which happens so many times in just over an hour, with very little variation, that it starts to feel mildly ridiculous. Leonberg finds a handful of clever ways to rework horror cliches from Indy’s perspective, which I won’t spoil, but he doesn’t find enough to stave off the sense of repetition that creeps in around the midpoint.
But one can’t complain too much. Leonberg set himself a taxing goal here, crafting a genuinely unique horror movie that wants to have something interesting to say about generational trauma, all with barely any money. There are a few moments that must have been nightmarishly difficult to pull off, and speak to a real talent that I can’t wait to see given a bigger budget. But as wonderful as Indy obviously is, he’d have been better served as the protagonist in a short film rather than a feature.