A horror tale told from the perspective of a dog, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is the sort of film that was always destined to live and die by the strength of its central gimmick. The pooch in question is a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Indy (played by the director’s own dog of the same name), who moves into a home in the woods with his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), and quickly sniffs out something sinister lurking in the shadows.
Good Boy finds several clever ways to draw us in to its canine perspective. Although Todd is usually by Indy’s side and a couple of other people wander into the story, their faces always remain out of view, alienating us from the human goings on up above Indy’s head. In one early scene, Todd gets out of his car to take a phone call while the camera stays inside with Indy so that what we hear of the conversation is hopelessly muffled. Like Indy, we can follow the general emotional contours of what Todd is saying, but we’re totally deaf to the details.
Kelsey Grammer once complained that his canine co-star on Frasier wasn’t a real actor because his only motivation was hot dogs. Regardless of what inspired Indy’s performance, though, the result is extremely affecting. It’s impossible not to look into those big, worried eyes and not swear a revenge of John Wick-ian proportions should anything bad happen to him.
A non-human protagonist does create certain storytelling obstacles for Good Boy, since Indy obviously isn’t able to talk about what’s going on around him, so the film has to find other ways to get the basic details of its plot across. An early montage of home videos from Todd’s phone provides a shorthand version of his backstory, including the fact that he’s been in and out of hospital a lot in recent years. A couple of non-muffled, helpfully expository phone calls taken in Indy’s vicinity tell us that the house is supposed to be haunted and that it used to belong to Todd’s grandfather, who may have died from a similar illness. At one point, Todd remarks, as much to the audience as to Indy, that members of his family have a habit of dying young.
Indy is haunted by strange, putrid figures that appear and disappear, as well as frightening noises he can’t find the source of, all while Todd’s behavior becomes increasingly strange. He senses that something is wrong but has no idea what it is or how to help. The film’s central metaphor is strong: It must be utterly terrifying to watch someone you love get sick when you don’t understand what’s happening. God knows, it’s terrifying enough when you do.
But Good Boy’s commitment to making us share Indy’s disorientation eventually becomes tiring. Sinister images and supernatural sights bleed into each other while our sense of time and place is blurred and it becomes increasingly hard to tell exactly what’s going on and, as a consequence, a little hard to care. The question “Can you tell a compelling horror story from the perspective of a dog?” is just about intriguing enough to carry Good Boy for most of its 72-minute runtime, even if the answer here is ultimately “not quite.”
Score:
Cast: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin, Anya Krawcheck Director: Ben Leonberg Screenwriter: Alex Cannon, Ben Leonberg Distributor: Shudder Running Time: 72 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2025
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