In the horror genre, you’d be a fool to ignore the concerns of a dog. While cats are mainly lurking in dark spaces waiting to collaborate with the orchestra on a cheap jumpscare, dogs are quick to alert their owners of nefarious goings on, acutely sensitive to threats whether they be human or not.
In the often ingenious new horror film Good Boy, a pet dog isn’t just an easily dismissed harbinger of evil, he’s the main character. Like last year’s Presence, which saw Steven Soderbergh tell a ghost story through the lens of the ghost, and In a Violent Nature, which gave us a gory slasher as seen by the killer, we’re given a fresh perspective on a story that’s anything but, this time a haunted house horror as seen by Indy, a loyal retriever. He’s worried about his owner Todd (Shane Jensen, whose face we barely see), who’s retreating to his grandfather’s remote cabin after an undefined medical crisis.
There’s already something haunted about the cabin, filled with memories of Todd’s family and the dogs they had before Indy, told via creepy old videotapes mysteriously filmed and preserved, but there’s something else lurking in the shadows. Indy is loyal to a fault, never too far from his owner, but as Todd’s behaviour starts to grow alarming, growing sicker as he stays there longer, how good of a boy can Indy be?
It turns out a very good boy, played rather brilliantly by another very good boy, the real dog of director Ben Leonberg, also called Indy. Without the assistance of any digital trickery (the film is small and ultra low budget) he is our eyes and ears throughout, fearfully reacting to bumps in the night and an owner who appears to be having a Jack Torrance-style transformation at the hands of the house and the spirits within it. Clearly working with the trust of the dog on his side, Leonberg turns a gimmicky elevator pitch into something surprisingly impactful, Indy representing a sort of confused child, unable to understand the disintegrating behaviour of his owner, without any real option but to stick by his side. Leonberg finds some nifty ways to tweak the construction and perspective of familiar haunted house scenes, late-night shadow exploration and basement checking led by a protagonist handicapped by his instincts and priorities, as well as an unwavering loyalty that risks his safety. There’s a sadness to how steadfast he remains even as the person he’s programed to protect might be the one he needs protection from, a refusal to give up on someone losing their mind and maybe soul. Leonberg also weaves in the expected contemporary genre trope – using a supernatural force to represent something more grounded, an insidious form of generational trauma, an inescapable rot – but without the clumsiness of his peers.
Yet even at a brief 73 minutes, Good Boy can feel stretched, a film that never quite convinces you that a short wouldn’t have worked better. Even though Indy is a remarkably expressive dog, there are only so many variations on dialogue-free scenes of him checking out a weird noise in the dark and the cycle soon gets repetitive, exposing a script that’s a bit on the thin side. The craft on display does however convince you that Leonberg has what so many other lazier, jumpscare-driven horror film-makers don’t currently possess, tasking himself with a pretty lofty narrative and technical feat and mostly pulling it off, bringing it home with a fittingly melancholic finale. His debut serves best as a punchy announcement of what he can do with so little, and big things clearly lie ahead for him. I just hope he brings Indy along.
