Good Boy teaches an old genre some new tricks.
A supernatural horror film told entirely from a dog’s perspective might sound like gimmickry until you realise how thoroughly Good Boy commits to the conceit. When Todd (Shane Jensen) relocates to his late grandfather’s rural home with his dog Indy after a health scare leaves him hospitalised, it’s not long before things start to go bump in the night in what’s less a haunted house than a sustained exercise in canine anxiety made manifest.
Perhaps it goes without saying that to really get Good Boy, you must love dogs. Without apology or accommodation, Indy is your window on this world. The camera stays low, human faces are frequently cropped out of frame, and the house becomes a dark labyrinth of sensory information that Indy, and by extension we, can only half-interpret.
Writer/ Director Ben Leonberg shot the film over 400 days across three years, which goes some way to explaining why Good Boy doesn’t feel like a stunt. Working with his own Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever in the lead role, he’s clearly learned how to navigate the limits and rhythms of a non-human performer. Indy isn’t coaxed into acting in any human sense: there are no sitcom reaction shots or soulful eye close-ups begging for sympathy. He behaves exactly as dogs do: ears pricking, head tilting, hesitant at thresholds; the performance is instinctual as well as expressive, and the film trusts us to do the translation. Stella Adler was fond of saying that “acting is reacting” and on that basis, Indy delivers what may just be the finest canine performance ever committed to celluloid.
The horror here is allegorical interpretation. Indy’s conceptualising of what happens is itself recontextualised by the audience into a horror movie but it’s fairly clear that’s not what’s really happening and the terror lurks in the shadow of that communication gap. Todd’s face is often obscured by shadow, glimpsed only from the waist down, and the audience is left to piece together his decline through sound and gesture. Old VHS tapes of his grandfather (Larry Fessenden) demonstrating taxidermy play alongside schlocky horror movies, blurring the borders between memory, media, and haunting into something genuinely unsettling, infusing Indy’s perception of events.
Where Good Boy distinguishes itself is in reversing the usual haunted-house mechanics. Instead of curiosity punished by discovery, fear comes from not understanding. Indy senses danger he can’t name, clings to Todd with a loyalty that becomes painful to watch. Leonberg makes that loyalty the film’s moral core; love without agency, devotion without comprehension. It’s a horror film about loyalty’s limitlessness in the face of the inevitable.
The 72-minute runtime is exactly right for a concept that could easily overstay its welcome but the longer it goes on the more dread gives way to dismay as the full emotional impact of what’s really happening becomes clear and by the time Good Boy reaches its conclusion, it’s less about the supernatural than the unbearable purity of devotion. Indy can’t understand or fix the horror that’s consuming his world; but he will not flee his owner’s side. Paws for thought indeed.
