Filmed over 400 days spanning three years, Good Boy is a haunted-house horror told from a dog’s point of view.
Directed by Ben Leonberg and co-written by Alex Cannon, the film stars Leonberg’s real-life dog, Indy – a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. To simplify production, Leonberg captured small portions of the film gradually over three years, completing it after 400 days of filming in the same location in Harding Township, New Jersey. It’s an intimate, indie approach that gives the whole project an authentic warmth.
The film follows Indy, the concerned titular ‘good boy, ’as he watches over his owner, Todd. After suffering some sort of supernaturally imposed disease in New York City, Todd moves to his late grandfather’s old home in the woods to recover, much to the dismay of his sister, Vera. She serves almost as an audience stand-in, embodying the obvious skepticism we’d all feel – essentially asking why Todd would make such a clearly bad decision. However, this change of location doesn’t help Todd shake his eerie ailment, and he is once again haunted by a supernatural force, seemingly the same one that led his grandfather to take his own life in this very house.
The entire film is shot from Indy’s perspective – he is the central character and appears in every scene. Some still shots capture Indy’s inquisitive sniffing of every corner of the house from the ground up, while other shots employ a direct POV where we see through his eyes. Witnessing eerie imagery from a perspective smaller than we’re used to makes simple moments feel more tense and frightening, as the house and its supernatural inhabitants loom over Indy with an intimidating scale.
What makes this approach work is the directing itself – capturing a believable performance from a dog is a genuine filmmaking achievement. For an independent project, Leonberg and the team extract remarkably precise emotions and thought processes from Indy, using a variety of camera tricks and angles combined with great editing. Leonberg has revealed in interviews that much of his process in capturing Indy’s “acting” was a blend of new tricks and commands, as well as incorporating as much of their own relationship and rituals into the filmmaking. This goes a long way toward making Indy’s performance feel authentic and realistic, which helps ramp up the film’s emotional stakes. His Oscar-worthy head tilts, sniffs, barks, and whines portray his inquisitive nature, his devotion to Todd, and, at many points, his courage in the face of fear. There’s even a mini character arc between Indy and Todd that comments on our relationships with our pets, the codependency, and how far we’ll go to protect our family.
The human actors are decent and serve their roles – the main one being Todd, Indy’s owner, who adequately portrays his confusion regarding his supernatural illness. However, he honestly left me puzzled at best and frustrated at worst with his very horror-movie-trope bad decision-making, as he shrugs off some enormous red flags.
This brings me to where the film doesn’t succeed as well. The plot loses focus over the film’s short runtime. It starts quite promisingly, offering glimpses of spooky happenings and leaving breadcrumbs for Indy and the audience to follow. But the film doesn’t really have the clarity to pursue any of these clues with much precision. Odd things continue to occur at random, often with confusing results, escalating in intensity but rarely resolving. Don’t get me wrong – I love a horror film that shows and doesn’t tell, like the confusing, chaotic horror masterpiece Hereditary (Ari Aster) or Kubrick’s The Shining. But where films like that succeed is in maintaining momentum throughout their confusing peaks. Good Boy flounders a bit in this area, culminating in a somewhat unsatisfying ending sequence.
The intentions of the haunting spirits are never explored or even considered, and the showdown between the courageous Indy and the nameless entities is messy and a bit flat in terms of energy. This is a shame because the editing and filming of Indy’s heroics are consistently impressive throughout, but the pacing falls short of effective horror storytelling. I can’t help but think that a more straightforward plot development might have worked better at showcasing the film’s best asset: Indy being a marvellously good boy. That said, I can’t really fault the director for going with something slightly more ambitious; the film as a whole is very ambitious and mostly pays off.
Overall, this film is a great watch and succeeds with its main concept with flying colours. The performance that Leonberg and his team extract from Indy is insanely impressive, emotional, and goes far beyond a dog just being cute. This sets the bar for animal-centric performances in cinema, proving that with the right approach, even a dog can carry a film emotionally and narratively. I’m all for independent filmmakers experimenting with new POVs like this.
Author: Elliot, Holborn Store
