This is the first movie I can think of that might have a vested interest in opening its title with something usually reserved at the very very end of credits: the animal cruelty disclaimer. It seems barbaric now, but decades ago, film productions didn’t give much care for the care of their animal actors. In the old days, especially at the height of Westerns, horses would just die by the dozens and sometimes be literal cannon fodder like in 1980’s Heaven’s Gate. Nowadays, productions are monitored for animal cruelty and make every effort to tell their stories without harming anyone, human and animal. Good Boy is a novel take on a familiar horror concept. It’s a haunted house movie about a nefarious life-sucking specter. It’s also completely told from the point of view of the family pet. It’s a common horror trope to have the animals sensing supernatural danger before their respective owners finally wise up, it’s another to base your entire movie on that perspective. That’s what director/co-writer Ben Loenberg put together over the course of three years, training his dog Indy to be the star of his debut feature film. While the film feels more like an empathy experiment than a fully developed movie, it’s an interesting twist that made me rethink familiar horror movie staples. Here’s a helpful spoiler to set your minds at ease: the dog lives, folks.
Indy is a golden retriever and just the bestest boy. His owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), is going through a lot. Todd is suffering from a fatal illness and has returned to his grandfather’s home in the country. Todd’s sister is worried over his deteriorating mental and physical state and also believes that the old family home is haunted by a sinister presence that contributed to their grandfather’s demise. What’s a dog to do?
It’s an interesting choice to have a dog as our main character because it’s both limiting as well as coursing with dramatic irony. Firstly, we know it’s a movie, and the dog is just a dog and doesn’t know its owners are making art by being purposely weird. So many animal performances are like candid camera exercises (cue think pieces arguing that the dog could not really give consent to being terrorized for art). Telling your story from only what a dog is privy to will naturally limit the extent of the story. We can overhear snippets of conversations to draw inferences but the movie is making a value judgement that its audience will fill in the blanks of its familiar ghost story. This is the filmmakers at peace with their story being hazy and familiar and underdeveloped. They’re sacrificing clarity for adhering to their artistic vision, but because it’s the whole relevant sticking point of the movie, I think they made the right call.
Alas, the dog is a limited perspective to tell a realistic story. However, the sense of dramatic irony is what helps add layers to the viewing. We see the dog know more but also simultaneously less than the humans. It senses the ghostly presence that the humans are ignorant of, but it doesn’t know why humans do their human things any more than any other non-human creature (we are puzzling). It makes for an experience where we are aware of what the dog knows but also simultaneously aware of what the dog doesn’t know. It makes for an interesting experience allowing the audience to empathize with our poor pooch but also recognize the dangers that it doesn’t and recognize the dangers that it’s trying to warn its owner over.
The perspective is a gimmick, sure, but it reminds me of last year’s In a Violent Nature, another indie horror project that took a familiar premise and turned it on its head through a canny choice of point of view. In that movie, we were presented the teenage slasher movie but from the beleaguered perspective of the zombified behemoth stalking the woods and trying to run into those mischievous teens. It was an experimental turn for a sub-genre that had been done to death by the conclusion of the 1980s, and that choice of perspective made it more reflective and contemplative as the viewer was forced to reconsider our relationship with these kinds of movies during the extended walks. Good Boy doesn’t go that philosophical distance, but its change of perspective refreshes the old tropes of the haunted house story.
Is Good Boy scary? Not really, but I actually don’t think that’s the point of the exercise either. The purposely underdeveloped story rests on familiar tropes, which cues the audience to place their attention less on the plot, rules, and explanations and more on empathizing with the dog. Because of this creative choice it can create tension whenever we feel like the dog is confused, alarmed, or threatened. While the filmmakers do a decent job of crafting a potent sense of mood with such a low-budget, I doubt few will characterize the movie as genuinely scary. However, what’s scary is what might happen to this good boy and his own emotional fragility trying to understand forces and choices beyond his capacity. I will say to the horror aficionados who also happen to be ardent animal lovers, there is another ghost dog that used to belong to the dead grandfather who met a tragic end, but other than that, Indy isn’t truly harmed. Still, I found the resolution to the movie, including the very final image, unexpectedly poignant and a reminder that dogs are so inherently loyal that we honestly don’t deserve them as a species.
Dogs are inherently empathetic beings, just ask any dog owner, so it’s easy to sympathize with this little guy trying to do his best to be the good boy he is. He just wants some pets and to cuddle with his human. He doesn’t know his owner is suffering from a chronic lung condition. He doesn’t know the strange man in black ooze creeping along the shadows isn’t another strange person. Our dog just knows things aren’t right. Naturally, without narration, our protagonist is going to be limited by what he can emote, and yet the filmmakers do a superlative job of getting the best performance out of their four-legged star. Through the judicious editing and planning, it really feels like this little guy is giving a performance, enough so that animal lovers might squirm occasionally in their seats. When the ghost is taking over Todd and he’s mean to Indy, I felt so bad for this little guy (he doesn’t know it’s all pretend). There are some wonderfully expressive close-ups, and while it’s entirely the Kulushov effect and I’m projecting meaning into a performance that isn’t actually there, that’s also the intention of the filmmakers. They are cajoling their non-verbal star and creating the performance through carefully crafted setups and edits, and it works.
Good Boy isn’t the first movie with “man’s best friend” as its lead (Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Benji, etc.) nor is it the first movie asking us to think from a non-human perspective. Its familiarity is the point, and it asks us to think of the tried ghost story but from the perspective of the curious canine. The movie is probably as long as it can be at 70 minutes without feeling truly punishing or significantly complicating its world building. I can’t fault people for viewing Good Boy as more of a gimmick or experiment than a fully engaging movie. It’s not going to be for everyone by the nature of its limited perspective and development; not everyone is going to be captivated watching a dog react to things for an hour. It didn’t fascinate me like In a Violent Nature but it did make me rethink the familiar, and to that end it’s an overall success and confirmation that you should always trust the animals when they sense something hinky.
Nate’s Grade: B-
This review originally ran on Nate’s own review site Nathanzoebl. Check it out for hundreds of excellent reviews!