One of the best things about the horror cinema landscape is creators' ability to produce something fresh, even conceptually daring, on a very low budget. This innovation is thrilling, inspiring, and, in some rare instances, has the added benefit of feeling like a bet between audience and filmmaker.
In the case of Good Boy, one of the year's buzziest horror titles, the bet is simple: I bet I can make you care about a horror story from the point of view of a dog for 73 minutes.
It sounds, even to a dog lover like me, like a rough assignment, something that almost assuredly has to be stretched and manipulated to produce the proper effect.
That's what you might think going in, but you'd be wrong. Directed with quiet power by Ben Leonberg and starring a beautiful and talented dog named Indy, Good Boy is one of the year's most successful horror experiments, and a reminder that trusting your concept, and your four-legged star, is often the more important than voluminous story.
Indy stars as himself, a concerned and thoughtful retriever (specifically a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever) whose owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), is both stubbornly avoiding treatment for a terminal illness and determined to venture out to his departed grandfather's (Larry Fessenden) old house in the woods. The house is Todd's inheritance, but it's also the family curse. Something is deeply wrong here, something that perhaps Todd's grandfather knew about, and something that Indy senses immediately upon arrival. Caught between his very sick human and a presence in the house that seems to have an appetite, Indy must get to the bottom of a supernatural mystery if he has any hope of saving Todd and himself.
These are the very straightforward (dog) bones of a good haunted-house story; what matters is what Good Boy does with them. And it starts, of course, with perspective.
This is a film that, clearly and right from the start, is more concerned with Indy than any human character. We hardly ever see Todd's entire face, most of the camera positions are down at dog and child height, E.T. style, and dialogue is sparse and limited to the salient information Indy picks up along the way. We get a sense of the interior lives of these people, particularly Todd, but there's nothing elaborate about the humans. They are mere support mechanisms.
Indy got the gig for this movie not because he's a trained animal actor, but because he's Leonberg and producer/co-writer Kari Fischer's real-life dog, and knowing this makes the performance he gives that much more remarkable. It helps that he's a retriever, one of those dogs built for action and intention, with an expressive face and a clear sense of duty to his humans (both in front of and behind the camera), but you can't just chalk this up to breeding. This is a special dog doing special work, infusing Good Boy not just with emotional weight, but with genuine dramatic tension. You can feel this dog thinking, moving through space with a genuine sense of presence and attention to detail, and it's exhilarating.
But while Indy is the film's main attraction, and has been since it burst onto the festival circuit, he is not the only reason to watch Good Boy. Working within his dog's world, Leonberg's camera infuses the film with a constant sense of sustained, malignant tension. Todd's ancestral home is filled with shadows, dark spaces packed with objects that might hold supernatural meaning or might just be weird old junk, and the film makes excellent use of its main location. At just 73 minutes, Leonberg keeps things stripped down and tight, but even with that short run time in mind, this is a film that knows how to milk a moment. Simple shots, like a well-composed trip down a hallway for Indy, become collages of menace, keeping you on the edge of your seat not because you love the dog at the center of the frame but because you're desperate to find out what those shadows hold.
This attention to pure craft — the sound design is also excellent — combined with a well-defined sense of place and, of course, a powerful central performance elevates Good Boy from conceptual bet to masterclass in how to manage and convey emotion, tension, and mystery in a horror film. Good Boy is more than just an interesting idea. It's a fascinating, very good film, and horror audiences, including the horror-curious, should show up for it.
Good Boy is in theaters October 3.
