Director: Ben Leonberg
Stars: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman
There’s a restlessness in horror, it seems, to find new vantage points. New ways of seeing. Regardless of how successful you consider them, films like In A Violent Nature, Presence and Skinamarink all seek to present familiar genre conceits from angles we haven’t considered before. Ben Leonberg joins their fray with his assured, striking and certainly original prospect; a horror movie presented from the perspective of a dog.
With a level of assurance that thankfully pays off, Leonberg has cast his own pet retriever Indy in the starring role. Here Indy is owned by Todd (Shane Jensen), a man evidently struggling with a chronic illness who decides to move into the woodland family home where his father and, apparently, many other members of the family died. Shrugging off the concerns of his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), Todd curls up in the house with Indy, but it transpires that his pet pooch is far more attuned to supernatural forces on the property than he is. Indy perceives lurking spectres, sinister eyes watching from the foliage at night, and a sodden oily menace that seems to be coming for Todd.
While this could have been achieved rather simply with a GoPro and rendered as a slightly comic spin on found footage, Leonberg has gone the other way; keeping an expertly poised camera at low level and including Indy in the shots and asking us, directly, to empathise. Be they static frames or roaming ones, the results from DP Wade Grebnoel are handsome, requesting our investigation of every corner of the screen as he keeps the house interiors riddled with shadow.
The lighting throughout is invariably handsome, in fact, while focus is used cannily to keep Todd murky and indistinct. Ultimately we know him as Indy knows him best; a pair of tree trunk legs donned in denim and an occasionally ruffling hand. Obscuring Todd in this way – often through shallow focus or backlighting – ensures that we aren’t distracted from connecting with Indy.
Good Boy plays it’s cards admirably close to the chest, dolling out information as it imagines Indy would perceive it. The occasional overheard phone call assists in placing these experiences into context for us, but the lion’s share over the story is conveyed through Indy’s reactions to the dark forces that have a habit of creating merry confusion of time and space. It’s standard fare for a haunting picture, but presented through these eyes it is whittled down to a dog’s instinctive responses. Run. Bark. Investigate. Hide. Protect. Indy is a good boy, and Leonberg wryly feathers the narrative with instances where his owner fails him, eliciting from us an emotional response. Thankfully the picture stops short of anything that might be constituted as cruelty.
While we often selfishly worry about the deaths of our dear pets, Good Boy asks us to consider, are these pets themselves worrying about us. The metaphors represented by the ghoulish interlopers at the house are plain to read, but the method of their implementation – and Leonberg (and Indy’s!) control of the telling – makes this one of the more successful hauntings to grace our screens in many a year. Where Presence was ultimately let down by a lack of confidence, leaning on dodgy soap opera dealings as a crutch, Good Boy sees it through, keeps things spare and asks the audience to participate. So often our fears can’t be articulated. Here they are muzzled from speech and shared by one of our closest companions. Any sense of novelty about Good Boy falls away as soon as this is understood.
Hell, I’m not even a dog person, but this might just be the best horror movie of the year.
Very good boy.
The Lost Highway Hotel 