★★★☆☆
Inventive and heartfelt, Good Boy offers a fresh canine perspective on horror,
though its promising premise ultimately feels underused.
Lesson one of including a dog in a horror movie is clear-cut: under no circumstances is the dog allowed to die. Even having them face mild peril can be pushing it, as moviegoers are generally happy to see any amount of butchery enacted on humans, provided the canines remain safe. Fortunately, in Good Boy, our four-legged protagonist and all-around devoted man’s best friend, Indy, (spoiler!) manages to make it to the end credits almost unscathed, albeit with a fair dose of supernatural terror inflicted throughout.
Good Boy isn’t the first horror movie with this title (see 2022’s surreal Norwegian offering), or even the first one released this year – Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough’s delinquent-teen tale has also been creeping out audiences lately. Initially intended just for Shudder, the Good Boy trailer was uploaded to YouTube in mid-August and subsequently went viral (at the time of writing, it’s amassed over 5.2 million views, no small feat!) and spurred on by this increased interest in the project, it’s received a wider cinematic release. Whichever way it’s found its way to us, Good Boy is an enjoyable, inventive and original new horror, though you can’t help thinking that some of director Ben Leonberg’s choices feel like missed opportunities.
On the surface, the premise is sound: a traditional haunted house movie told from the pet’s perspective. Leonberg casts his own pet, Indy, as the devoted hound of the same name. Indy’s owner, Todd, recovering from an unspecified lung disease, moves the pair to his late grandfather’s woodland cabin while he recovers. As is standard with such settings, Indy begins to sense a demonic presence lurking in the shadows, long before his human catches on.
The movie does a good job of making you care for Indy. He’s a dog, for starters, both innocent and irresistibly cute. Animals in horror films automatically command our sympathy as they haven’t volunteered themselves for any of it – they didn’t choose to commit the cardinal sins of horror films like choosing to move into the obviously creepy cabin – that’s all on their humans. Leonberg heightens this attachment with genuine home footage of Indy as a puppy at the start, and by giving us a dog that can act extremely well. Kudos to the dog’s handlers, who manage to eke out the best canine performance since 2014’s White God. To quote Leonberg as a means of reassuring audiences worried for his pet’s wellbeing, “I can’t stress enough that (Indy) has no idea he’s in a movie.” To elicit such nuanced reactions from a dog while keeping him safe and content throughout filming is an especially unique skill. If there were an Oscar for this kind of work, Indy’s handlers would be fierce contenders.
That said, a great deal of Good Boy’s plot requires a generous suspension of disbelief. Why would Todd select the creepy cabin where his grandfather died as the ideal location to recover from his illness? Why would he watch TV on a flickering 90s set stuttering with static, when he could easily order a new one? Why does his neighbour insist on wearing a scary mask when out laying fox traps in the surrounding fields? The one stylistic choice that’s most bothersome, however, is the decision to never reveal Todd’s face. In horror films, often, less is more, and plenty of the truly terrifying monster movies have chosen not to reveal the monster, to a significant, petrifying impact. But in not showing us the person we’re meant to be rooting for, who all of Indy’s endeavours are in aid of, we’re kept at a distance, and it’s impossible to feel genuinely worried for his well-being. If our hero Indy’s staunch raison d’être is to protect his human, then preventing us from ever seeing the human also stops us from relating to Indy in any real way beyond thinking “cute pup, hope he survives.”
With its 73-minute running time, the film is commendably short given its brief subject matter, but it could benefit from being even shorter. You can’t help but think this idea would be more effective as a short film, and the repeated cycle of “something creepy appears, then vanishes” loses impact after the third or fourth time. Like Presence earlier this year, it’s a great idea that never quite builds enough momentum to deliver lasting chills. That said, it’s an entertaining and clever experiment, and there are certainly fun moments, but it might make for more of a rainy-day horror movie watch at home than a big-screen cinema trip.
The Verdict:
Good Boy is an inventive and endearing twist on the haunted house formula, buoyed by its canine star and clever concept, even if its scares and story don’t quite live up to its bark.
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