Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is a gentle horror movie. It pants through the lungs of a dying man and the intuition of a dog who knows too much. This is no creature feature or a ghost story. It is a film that waits, sees, and is unable to save what cannot be saved.
Indy, the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, is never anthropomorphized. He is a dog living a dog’s life. He senses, dreams, and remembers. Indy is faithful, sentient, and contained in his physicality. And it is this memory, matched with instincts, that is Good Boy’s pulse.
The horror is built on loneliness. Todd (Shane Jensen), ill and devolving, lives in a house filled with death memories. His sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) calls from a distance, but her voice never penetrates the rot in the walls. The neighbor, Richard (Stuart Rudin), gives advice and fox traps but no comfort. The house is a tomb waiting to be filled again and again.
Indy sees glimpses of the looming figures before Todd does. He is, in Todd’s eyes, a vision of another missing dog, a golden retriever named Bandit. Indy retrieves Bandit’s bandana from under the wardrobe. In doing so, Indy has nightmares about a skull-faced creature covered in mud. He is powerless to halt Todd’s decline and eventual death. He watches helplessly when Todd coughs up blood, cracks his head into doors, and ultimately, sadly, passes away. This absence and loneliness are Indy’s burden and enemy until Good Boy’s end.
Indy earns the title Good Boy. Todd, before he is pulled into the muck of the Grim Reaper, says it to Indy with his last breath. “Good Boy.” He stayed, tried, and remembered —Todd’s good boy to the end.
Indy is no Cujo, White Dog, or The Breed. The film has the courage and wisdom to let Indy be his unadorned self. And in that holding back, Good Boy finds something even scarier: the boundaries of loyalty of a dog to his caretaker. The horror of what dogs can know, can do and never change, no matter how hard they may try.
Grade: B+.
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