Basing your debut feature around a gimmick this huge is…something of a risk, to say the least.
It’s the first thing that jumped out to me about Ben Leonberg’s much-hyped feature film debut, Good Boy, when I heard about this dog-led haunted house horror. Yes, you read that right – Good Boy, as the title might suggest, is a horror movie that’s led by and told primarily from the point of view of a dog, Indy.
It’s been the movie’s major selling point, and honestly, it’s not hard to see why. Horror is at its most effective when it makes you really care about the leads, and it’s virtually impossible not to find yourself rooting for this dog within the first eight seconds of his screentime (and by rooting for, I mean ready and willing to kill everyone in the room if he looked at me with slightly sad eyes). And the film does a good job exploiting that to its furthest extent, with Indy’s natural ability to emote and draw the protectiveness of the audience drawn out without necessarily going too hard on any needless brutality.
And the shift in perspective does genuinely offer some interesting new approaches to cinematography and cinematic language in general. The floor-up viewpoint that we take with Indy gives everything a slightly warped feel compared to a usual, you know, human-height point of view, and there’s a really great sense of atmosphere that blends classic gothic elements with the leading man – uh, canine’s -experience. Jumpscares that might have felt predictable with a human lead are given a little more bite (pun intended) with a perspective we haven’t seen before, and threats like fox traps and outdoor kennels take on a different tone in the process.
But, in order to tell a movie from such a limited point of view, Good Boy has to boil its story down to the bare minimum, and it shows. At a scant seventy-three minutes, it’s a very lean story – and that, at a certain point, starts to feel as though it’s to its detriment. Following Indy’s owner, Todd, as he struggles with a terminal illness as he returns to a haunted family property, it relies on some pretty clunky phone calls to communicate most of the backstory, and the actual monsters are relatively unoriginal in their design and execution. I understand that, in order to pull this off at all, the story can’t be too ambitious, but when you look past the gimmick, I’m not convinced there’s a whole lot here at all.
But, in all fairness, I don’t think the film is trying to argue that there is. And it does succeed in telling a cogent and coherent horror story from the point of view of a dog, so I have to give it its flowers in that regard – I’ll be interested to see whether Leonberg leans on another gimmick for his next movie or tells a more complex story in a more straightforward way.
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Hollywood Reporter)
No But Listen 