Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!
I am a dog person. With a movie like Good Boy, I think it’s important to put that out at the top of the review. I’m fine with animals in general, but dogs are absolutely the animals I feel the most connected to, and I’ve had a bunch—cats, rats, hedgehogs, a snake, a gecko, frogs, turtles, doves and other birds, guinea pigs (both hairy and hairless) and more. But it’s the dogs who are central to me. George Carlin once said that life is a series of dogs, and he’s not wrong. Good Boy is a movie from the perspective of a dog, which makes it pretty close to unique in the film world in general and the horror world in specific.
Todd (Shane Jensen) has a chronic lung ailment that is causing him to pass out and cough up blood. He movies with his dog Indy (also named Indy), a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever out to a family home in the country in the hopes of healing. His sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) worries about his health and his isolation in the family house, in particular because a number of people have lived there for a short time before dying. It’s Vera’s opinion that the house is haunted and that Todd will not survive there for long.
When there, Todd discovers video tapes made by his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), who died of something similar to what Todd is suffering from. Todd is informed by a neighbor (Stuart Rudin) that he has set fox traps in the area and that Todd’s grandfather’s golden retriever Bandit has been missing since the old man’s death. As Todd deals with his illness, we see Indy catching glimpses of a dark entity in the house, as well as having dreams about Todd’s grandfather and Bandit, all of which seem to end very badly.
There are a number of ways that Good Boy can be interpreted, but most of them are going to involve some level of spoilers. Now that I have the basics of the plot out of the way, it’s time to talk about what all of this means, and that means you can consider the rest of this review, at least down to the next picture, to be under a spoiler tag.
The most obvious way to interpret Good Boy is the way that a number of people have interpreted the cartoon show Courage the Cowardly Dog. Essentially, one of the more plausible interpretations of that show is that the world that is being depicted is actually completely normal, but is seen through the eyes of the dog, who doesn’t really understand anything, and so is terrified of everything that is happening around him.
What I mean is that while there are a few moments that suggest that Todd is also experiencing something supernatural, this can be interpreted as being entirely about something completely natural. Todd has an illness that is potentially killing him, and the dark entity that Indy sees in the house and throughout the film is essentially the specter of death. In a sense, Indy is sensing what is happening to Todd the way that dogs can be trained to sniff out cancer, and is essentially manifesting it as an apparition haunting the house. The evidence for this is the fact that frequently, Todd becomes the entity in question—if it’s his health issues, it makes perfect sense why he’d become the dark figure himself.
The problem with Good Boy is that it’s both too short and too long. The running time of the film is a sparse 73 minutes, which includes the credits, which include a couple of bonus extras. It barely scratches the idea of being feature length. At the same time, while there are some good moments of tension building, the film is repetitive. Since everything comes from Indy’s point of view, nothing is going to be explained. We’re going to see Todd coughing and collapsing and Indy not understanding. Indy will see the dark figure and not understand what is happening. We’re left to puzzle things out—and I appreciate that—but we’re going to see a lot of the same thing over and over to get us there.
This is a fascinating idea for a film, though. While I want more to happen here and I want this to run another 15 minutes or so, what is here is unique. It’s a singular vision of what can be done with film, demonstrating that despite the number of films that have been made, there are still new ways to tell a story.
I said I was a dog person. I have two dogs right now, Hank and Floyd. That’s them in the picture below. If you’ve got good boys (or girls) of your own, you’ll likely find this one interesting and very much worth its short running time.
Why to watch Good Boy: When else are you going to see a horror movie from the point of view of a dog?
Why not to watch: It’s simultaneously too short and too long.
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