Not just cute, dog-led horror movie is the real deal – Marin Independent Journal

The best thing about “Good Boy,” a horror movie from the perspective of a dog, is that it’s actually scary. Though director and cinematographer Ben Leonberg understandably bathes his four-legged lead in angelic rays of light in contrast to the decaying and mossy production design, he resists the temptation to gesture at the dog and tell the audience what a good boy he is — at least until a post-credit behind-the-scenes featurette breaks the ice and gives the audience all the puppy action they came for.

People might come to “Good Boy” expecting a cuter or more clever movie, but take the dog away and you’d have something close to Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days”: a slow-paced indie drama set in a leafy enclave that death comes to visit. It’s to Leonberg’s credit that he uses the dog as a way to break the ice while dealing with serious material, rather than letting the film itself go soft at the sight of Indy’s big wet eyes.

Indy’s owner is dying. We see that in the first scene. Inexplicably, he decides to cut off contact from his concerned sister and move to the same apparently haunted cabin in the woods where his grandfather (played through VHS footage by horror grandmaster Larry Fessenden) wasted away from a similar disease.

Indy in “Good Boy.” (Ben Leonberg/Independent Film Company/Shudder/TNS)

From the start, there’s obviously a presence in the woods. There are a few creepy encounters with a ghillie-suited neighbor whose appearances might remind horror fans of the ominous backwoods hunters in Fessenden’s “Wendigo,” but that doesn’t explain the growing shadows in the corners, which Indy can see but of which his owner remains only ambiguously aware. These scenes are genuinely frightening, relying less on jump scares than on the existence of something else in the home becoming increasingly obvious.

The nature of the entity, and what relationship it has to the death of Indy’s owner and his grandfather, is a bit murky. Being a dog, Indy understands it mostly as a threat, though there’s a scene towards the end that offers a rather extreme reinterpretation of Jack London’s concept of “the call of the wild.” (I wish the film had ended just three seconds earlier — you’ll see what I mean.)

In the concluding mini-documentary, Leonberg explains Soviet montage theories to demonstrate how Indy might seem to “perform.” This might seem at odds with the open letter Indy “wrote” to the Academy asking for dogs to be included alongside humans, but for the purposes of this film, Indy acts, convincingly, as a normal dog must.

No reactions on cue. No bravely tugging ropes across rivers like Lassie. There are probably moments where he acts a little smarter and more self-aware than an average dog, but I don’t remember them. What he knows is concern for his owner, and we see that in his wide eyes. To put oneself inside the mind of a dog would seem like a monumentally abstract task, but as Indy barks and wags his tail in distress and is dismissed by his owner, it’s easy to put yourself in the shoes of a child, never listened to by the grown-ups, your concerns always dismissed.

The movie, of course, is too much of a golden retriever to really put us inside Indy’s perspective. A more enfant terrible-type director like Robbie Banfitch (“The Outwaters”) or Kyle Edward Ball (“Skinamarink”) might have actually attempted to bridge the gulf of mutual incomprehension dividing humans and animals, maybe with a more subjective visual style, maybe with scenes just showing a dog being a dog apart from what the plot requires it to growl at. That movie would make a lot less money and probably be a lot less entertaining, but someone should make it; it’d be interesting.

Still, if “Good Boy” doesn’t answer the question of what it’s like to be an entirely different form of life, it at least answers the question of how to smuggle some pretty serious and despairing ghost horror onto the plates of audiences who might think they’re getting “Beethoven” mixed with “Poltergeist.”