‘Good Boy’ movie review: A fetching pawtrait of a haunting

Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is the much-awaited horror film told through the eyes of a dog. If that ever sounded like a gimmick for those of us who chanced upon raves for the film on Twitter, rest assured, it’s probably one of the most honest and crushing ways to make a movie about grief. 

The film opens on a dog staring into the dark with that unnerving clairvoyance pets seem to reserve for demons and delivery folk. Anyone who’s lived with one likely knows (and has probably soiled themselves) over that look. Leonberg takes the creepiness of that moment and builds an entire haunted house movie around it.

Horror has rarely looked this small (meant in the best of ways), and Good Boy operates on the narrow register of one man, one dog, one house. Todd, played by Shane Jensen, has just survived cancer. He takes his dog Indy to his late grandfather’s pre-haunted cabin to recover. The house sits a little too still in the middle of the woods. There are cobwebs, whispers, and a general sense that no one should be there. Indy, being a sensible creature, spends most of the movie realising how his human has made a terrible decision. 

Leonberg’s trick is to film the whole thing from Indy’s perspective, flattening its space and dislocating human authority. The camera hugs the floor and makes everything look larger, heavier, and vaguely threatening. Human faces are conspicuously out of frame. It’s a world of shoes, furniture legs, and the strange shimmer of a figure that may or may not be real, that reframe the film’s terrors as little observations. Leonberg builds his story out of small, uncanny gestures like a door closing without reason, or the sound of footsteps/breathing off-frame, that won’t settle.

A still from ‘Good Boy’
| Photo Credit:
IFC/ Shudder

The conceit could have been whimsical, but Leonberg uses it to construct a theory of perception. Every movement is an act of translation from instinct into image. The film’s visual grammar also recalls Robert Eggers, but its emotional register feels closer to something like The Babadook in its portrayal of grief rendered through domestic geometry.

Indy’s performance is extraordinary in its purity. His stillness recalls the animal realism of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, or more recently, Jerzy Skolimowski’s incredible EO. Every flick of his ear, tilt of his head, or arrested gaze feels remarkably calculated. When Todd ignores every obvious sign of danger, Indy gives him an, ‘Are you serious?’ kind of look that feels like an homage to his spiritual predecessor in Courage the Cowardly Dog, and makes for the best running gag in the film. If the poor chap knew he was in a horror film, he’d have likely quit halfway through and demanded an agent.

A still from ‘Good Boy’
| Photo Credit:
IFC/ Shudder

Todd meanwhile, starts to come undone. His illness lingers in the background, feeding into the haunting. The lines between sickness and possession blur, but thankfully the film doesn’t spell anything out, and that restraint lends it a strange tenderness. The ‘creature’ itself functions as some sort of metaphor for the persistence of care and the film soon becomes a study in dependency, where love is indistinguishable from captivity. It’s about loyalty in the face of decay, about believing when belief stops making sense, à la Hachiko.

Good Boy is what happens when love outlives language. By privileging a nonhuman gaze, Leoberg dismantles the anthropocentric arrogance of most horror. Long used as emotional collateral in the genre, this marvellous animal becomes subject rather than symbol. And to settle the Internet’s most urgent line of inquiry, all of you may rest easy. [SPOILER] It appears the services of a certain Mr. Wick may not be required after all.

Indy is indeed a very good boy. Calling his turn one of the year’s best performances feels unfair to the humans, who simply don’t stand a chance against that face card.

Good Boy is currently running in theatres