[COLUMN] Canine Horror Good Boy Taps Into a Very Human Fear | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Good Boy, the new horror film from Ben Leonberg, in theatres now. It’s a pretty fun twist on the classic horror movie, with a really neat high concept. It’s worth checking out, if you’re at all interested, so if you are going to wait for it to stream on Shudder, feel free to bookmark and come back.

It’s very easy to appreciate Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy on a purely technical or craft-based level.

Good Boy is effectively a classic horror movie told from the perspective of a dog. The story follows a young man named Todd (Shane Jensen), who moves to his deceased grandfather’s (Larry Fessenden) quiet rural home following a health scare involving his lungs. Todd takes his loyal Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever Indy (himself) with him. It quickly becomes clear that something is wrong about the house, with the film unfolding from Indy’s perspective.

Narratively, this is an innovative approach to a fairly formulaic horror movie. It recalls recent arthouse slashers like Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature or JT Mollner’s Strange Darling, movies that apply a fairly unique structural conceit to a reliable horror template. Good Boy is a prime example of Roger Ebert’s argument that “a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it.” One could make a more conventional version of Good Boy, but that would defeat the purpose.

It's interesting to think about the mechanics and the logistics of making a film like Good Boy. If the story is being told through Indy’s perspective, how does the film thread the needle of providing enough exposition for the audience to follow the straightforward narrative while still remaining true to the premise? Dogs don’t talk, after all, and they don’t understand English. How does a film communicate stakes or rules or many of the trappings of classic horror?

Intellectually, it’s fun to watch Good Boy figure out what the canine version of a classic horror movie beat might look like – the jump scare, the voyeuristic camera, the lore dump, the strange shadows, the ghostly apparition. The audience has seen enough horrors to parse these images instinctively, but reworking them so they make sense with a dog instead of a human protagonist adds an element of novelty and excitement that is enough to sustain the film’s perfectly calibrated 73-minute runtime.

Leonberg commits to the bit. He borrows classic horror compositions, often shooting over his protagonist’s shoulders or holding a long take on Indy’s face. There is something compelling in the application of the language of classic horror to this most unusual lead performer. A lot of this is craft. Leonberg has talked to IndieWire about how so much of what makes the film work is the Kuleshov Effect, using the power of editing to create context for the audience to “read” Indy’s performance.

It's easy to get lost in the “magic trick” of the film, to wonder how much of what makes Indy such a watchable screen presence is inherent to the dog himself and how much of it is down to the apparatus of the movie around him. As somebody familiar with dogs, it’s fun to watch a sequence in which Indy’s movements have to be carefully choreographed, and ponder how many the team got Indy to do what they needed him to do on cue, and how many takes it must have taken to get it.

All of this is a fun academic exercise and would be enough to make Good Boy a fun film to think about on its own merits, another example of the fun experimentation taking place in independent horror cinema. The larger theatrical industry might be in chaos, but horror is thriving. Good Boy had the third biggest opening weekend ever for distributor IFC, behind similar experimental horrors Late Night with the Devil and In a Violent Nature. It also had the company’s second-best weekend hold.

However, Good Boy is more than just its high concept. Rather, it’s a film that uses its high concept in service of bigger ideas. True to Ebert’s observation, form and function are tied together. Good Boy stands apart from many similar films in its execution, but that execution is in service of larger themes. How Good Boy goes about itself is inseparable from what Good Boy is actually about. The film’s canine perspective allows Good Boy to engage with more universal concepts.

To put it simply, Good Boy is a movie about powerlessness and loss. The film is about watching somebody slip away, slowly and surely, but inevitably, while being unable to do anything to stop it from happening. The film is told from Indy’s point of view, and Indy is the protagonist, but it is ultimately about Todd. It is about the sensation of losing Todd, watching Indy’s beloved owner slip away inch by inch as Indy is incapable of stopping it.

The film begins with Todd suffering a hazily defined physical ailment. Indy is with him when it happens, but Indy is unable to help. Indy is, after all, just a dog. Indy lacks the ability to talk or communicate. Indy has no sense of basic human biology. Indy may not even have a meaningful understanding of the concept of mortality beyond the abstract. However, Indy knows Todd. Indy cares for Todd. And there is nothing that Indy can do to help Todd in that moment.

Good Boy is largely framed in such a way as to obscure Todd’s face. It is often facing away from the camera, or shot in shadow, or out of focus, or in the distance. Part of this is the film’s formalism in effect. The close-up has always been one of the great instruments of cinematic storytelling – something that powers what Ebert described as the “empathy machine” – and Good Boy reserves its close-ups for Indy, to retain its focus on the dog above all.

However, it also renders Todd as a more abstract presence. It’s unclear exactly what is wrong with Todd. It’s unclear exactly how far along his illness is. It’s unclear what his prognosis is. The film offers fragments of exposition in scenes where Indy is present – scans at a hospital, concerned phone calls from Todd’s sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), a tense conversation in a doctor’s (Anya Krawcheck) office – but the specifics are always kept just out of reach.

While the particulars of Todd’s sickness remain vague, Good Boy makes it very clear that Todd has cut himself off from the world. His move to that creepy abandoned house in the wilderness, complete with strolls through the family plot, is an obvious attempt to remove himself from mundane day-to-day living. He grows frustrated with Vera constantly checking in on him, feeling suffocating and lashing out at her. He rejects medicine, decorating the house with new-age trappings and ornaments.

Indy is by his side through all of this. Much of the horror in Good Boy feels like Indy’s sublimated sense of loss – the sense there is something rotten in this house, the fear Todd is perhaps undergoing a physical and spiritual transformation into something monstrous, the siren call that seems to emanate from the basement below the house. Indy lacks the tools to understand what is happening to Todd. All Indy can do is try to keep Todd company, try to watch over him, try to guard the door.

There is something of an emotional Kuleshov effect to this storytelling. Just as Leonberg is able to create a sense of emotional continuity for Indy through editing, the film creates a thematic continuity through its storytelling. It’s impossible to know what is going through Indy’s mind, as Indy is a dog. However, Good Boy captures the broader sense of what it is to watch somebody slip away without entirely understanding why and knowing that one is powerless to stop it.

In this sense, Good Boy feels like a loose companion to the recent spate of horror movies about the impossibility of keeping children safe in this modern world, of being unable to protect the people who need the most protection. Indy is not explicitly a guard dog, but one of the primary roles of a canine pet – particularly a larger dog in a rural setting – is to protect the home. Indy is presented with a threat that he cannot ward away. Todd’s illness may as well be a supernatural entity.

Good Boy overlaps with the other big recurring thematic preoccupation in contemporary horror, the notion of unarticulated grief. Just as Spike (Alfie Williams) cannot save his mother (Jodie Comer) in 28 Years Later, Indy cannot save Todd. The climax of the movie is Indy coming to terms with the loss of Todd, understanding that there is only so much that he can do and that at some point he needs to let go. “You’re a good boy,” Todd confesses towards the end of the film. “But you can’t save me.”

It's a surprisingly emotionally hefty hook for a film pitched as a classic horror movie told from the perspective of the dog. It’s also reinforced through the film’s storytelling. Of course Indy cannot save Todd. Indy cannot even fully understand what is happening and why it is happening. Even with a canine protagonist, it’s a very relatable feeling. It seems likely that almost every viewer will be able to relate to the emotional reality of that experience, even if they walk on two legs.