"Good Boy"

☆☆☆½ 

As a horror movie, Good Boy is pretty toothless. It's an okay haunted-house story with a couple of really nice jolts and a PG-13 rating that seems a bit on the strict side. There's a solid argument to be made that on the horror scale, Good Boy is more of a family film, pretty safe for everyone who wants some gentle scares.

But as a star vehicle, a movie that exists to present the world to a new screen sensation, Good Boy excels.

The performer in question is named Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever who technically co-stars alongside a few human performers, but because the whole movie is told from Indy's point of view, they're almost never seen.

What happens to Indy's human, a man named Todd (played, almost incidentally, by Shane Johnson) moves into a remote house in the middle of some rather forbidding woods. Todd is suffering from a serious illness, and he's having a hard time. His sister, Vera, doesn't like the idea of him being out there in the house that used to be owned by their grandfather, who died under some rather awful and potentially horrifying circumstances. Grandpa had a loyal dog named Bandit, who has been missing since the old man's death.

Indy is a loyal dog, a good boy if ever there was one, and watches Todd go through his physical decline, all the while paying attention to a rather sinister presence in the house that he, but not Todd, can sense.

The presence comes closer. It's shadowy and scary and lurks in all the dark corners, and Indy is ... aware.

Indy worries about Todd. And when the thing comes closer, it coincides with Todd's decline in both physical and mental health. Todd does some very mean (but don't worry, dog lovers, not that awful) things to Indy, but Indy never loses his faith in the man.

Indy doesn't understand what is happening. Then again, neither does Todd. But Indy knows that there's something in the house.

That's pretty much the whole movie. Indy watches this thing in the shadows, which sometimes makes an appearance.

When I was a kid, the dog movie Benji became a huge hit. Benji wasn't about much. The filmmakers kind of constructed a movie around the things that Benji (the actor) did as Benji, the character. But we all loved it, because Benji seemed so ... human. What an actor! Well, let's just say that Benji has nothing on Indy. Benji was a performer. Indy is a star. It's possible to imagine other movies told from Indy's perspective. Indy manages to hold the film in ways most human actors can never manage.

Like I said, Good Boy is just passable as a scary movie. It's only 72 minutes long, for one thing, barely long enough to qualify as a feature film. It turns out there's a reason. Playing with Good Boy when I saw it, placed after the film, is a five-minute featurette with writer-director Ben Leonberg, in which he explains how the movie was made.

It turns out that the secret to this movie was an almost infinite amount of patience. Leonberg took an interesting concept — telling a story from the dog's point of view — and pulled it off by using a film technique known as the Kuleshov effect. It's a fascinating thing: a man with a neutral expression is juxtaposed with a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a pretty girl, and even though the man's expression never changes the audience perceives him as hungry, sad, and lustful based solely on what he's implied to be looking at. It's this effect, Leonberg explains, that allows Indy to become a great performer.

Indy is mesmerizing. He makes the film. So what if the performance happened in the editing room? It might be a first for a dog, but it's happened to plenty of human actors who became stars.

The dog should have such a fate.

Viewed October 17, 2025 — AMC Universal 16

1330