Good Boy (2025) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Horror from a dog's POV - video Dailymotion

Film Brain

Turns out your pet dog can be the star of his own movie! Film Brain reviews a horror flick that's surprisingly adorable, if not that scary.

Transcript

00:00Director Ben Leonberg makes his dog Indy the star in Good Boy, a horror film from the dog's POV.

00:06Not to be confused with the other Good Boy about the guy in the dog suit that I previously covered,

00:10or the Stephen Graham one currently doing the festival all around,

00:14or the Matthew Broderick Talking Alien Dog movie.

00:17There's too many movies named Good Boy!

00:20Indy stars as the faithful mutt of Shane Jensen's Todd,

00:23who has moved back into his empty family home in the country after a house scare.

00:27Soon after moving in, Indy becomes aware of a supernatural presence in the house,

00:31and becomes determined to try and save his owner before it's too late.

00:35The story behind Good Boy is genuinely adorable.

00:38Shot on a micro budget, Leonberg spent three years coaxing the central performance out of Indy,

00:44and now it has become one of the most buzzed-about horror films of the year.

00:48That hard work has paid off because Indy is not just cute,

00:51but his expressive eyes that Leonberg often cuts to give him a lot of emotion,

00:56and Indy's performance is even more impressive because he's not a trained movie animal,

01:00so his responses feel natural and instinctual.

01:03It's genuinely surprising how a dog can be so watchable enough that he can carry a movie by himself.

01:09And the conceit behind Good Boy is inspired.

01:11Anyone who owns a dog knows they tend to bark at dark corners or things that aren't there,

01:16and in horror films, their heightened senses means they're usually the first to detect a sense of presence,

01:21as well as a frequent target.

01:23And Good Boy commits to the dog's eye view for the most part by framing much of the film on Indy's level,

01:29with Todd often just out of the frame in a way that's almost reminiscent of the parents in a Peanuts cartoon.

01:35However, the dog's perspective does have limitations,

01:38and as a horror film, Good Boy isn't really that scary,

01:41and is a fairly basic and simple haunted house movie with frequent jump scares.

01:46The gimmick really is the central attraction,

01:48and Leon Berg is smarter to keep it to just a brief 72 minutes,

01:52but even then it does start to become perilously stretched towards the end of the short running time.

01:58I did find the film becomes slightly more interesting when you read it as a dog struggling to comprehend what's happening to his owner,

02:04and becomes the dog's worst nightmare.

02:07Todd watches old tapes of his reclusive grandpa in horror films,

02:10and some of the scares in those clips are actually echoed later on to Indy.

02:14That theory doesn't entirely hold,

02:17as there's scenes of Todd without Indy that clearly have a supernatural presence,

02:21but the heart of the film is the loyalty that dogs have to their owners,

02:24even as Todd's behaviour gets more unstable.

02:28That's slightly undermined by the fact that Todd's haunted right from the very start,

02:32so he don't get enough of a sense of how he was before,

02:35nor a lot of characterisation as he gets sicker.

02:37There's definitely echoes of Skinner Meringue,

02:39and while a little bit sly,

02:41this is a horror film that will especially resonate with dog lovers.

Good Boy (2025) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Horror from a dog's POV

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended