Supernatural thriller Good Boy does daring drama from a dog’s perspective
Courtesy IFC Films
Earlier in the year, Good Boy got announced and immediately filled my friend group with equal parts demand to see it immediately… and of course, dread. A horror film told from a dog’s perspective hooked us. Who wouldn’t want to see that? Well, I suppose, most people. Considering how things tend to go for dogs in horror films, why would anyone sign up to do this to themselves? Before I owned a dog, I was someone who could at least suffer through violence to animals in a film—if the horror film at least earned it through the narrative and filmmaking skill. Now I’m the kind of guy who checks the DoesTheDogDie website ahead of screenings or walking out when a film decides to treat a cat unkindly. With that in mind, Good Boy has loomed as both a delight and promise of a potentially clever twist, and/or a threat of disgruntled resentment to come.
I am thrilled to report that we do, indeed, have an all-timer on our hands here—well worth the watch and not nearly the specific nightmare I’d hoped to avoid.
Our canine hero, Indy, finds himself on a new adventure with his human owner Todd, leaving city life for a long-vacant family home in the country. From the start, two things are abundantly clear: Indy is wary of the creepy old house, and his affection for Todd is unwavering. After moving in, Indy is immediately vexed by empty corners, tracks an invisible presence only he can see, perceives phantasmagoric warnings from a long-dead dog, and is haunted by visions of the previous occupant’s grim death.
The first thing to celebrate is that a film “from the dog’s perspective” is not, say, just a film that involves a low camera moving across the ground at dog-eye-level, perhaps with a fisheye lens, giving us a first-person view of getting scratches or sniffing in the dirt. This is a gorgeous indie flick, with the dog as star, and the world around Indy reflecting his ability to understand it—and equally what he cannot. Human faces are decided absent/blurred, and lighting takes huge swings for the fences, while audio design and tone place you squarely in an identifiably animalistic space. This is first and foremost a mystery, and that sense of perplexing missing pieces is only further complicated by the canine context.
This could have easily worked as a simple haunted house horror film and been perfectly good. Our actual real-life dog in the lead role could carry that all by himself, and a threadbare plot around a visually interesting design would’ve made it worth the watch alone. That filmmaker Ben Leonberg manages to simply and effectively weave in several layers of familial/generational/sibling trauma along with themes of healthcare critique and the power of devotion, alongside an inate reckoning with the very nature of mortality… fuck, man.
Also the film runs just under 80 minutes. It gets in, does everything it wants to do, and gets out. To me, this is cinema.
Good Boy is playing in theaters now.
