Good Boy

Good Boy is a very good film regardless but laden with a whole other layer of emotional resonance if the viewer has a dog of their own. It’s impossible to watch Indy, the Duck Tolling Retriever star of the film, and not steal occasional glances to the dog curled up next to you and wonder about their interior life. Director and owner of Indy Ben Leonberg reminds us in the film itself that humans have lived with dogs for thousands of years, for companionship and protection – there is footage here of a documentary about cave paintings that include them. Their bravery and devotion have been celebrated in films countless times. Virginia Woolf’s beautiful Flush, a “biography” of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, the connection between dog and human transcends language, and it considers how the world would look through the specific sensory perception of Flush. 
Indy finds himself in a horror film though, a genius idea because it riffs on the supernatural – haunting presences, traumatic history inscribed on a house – by implying that the vastly superior senses of a dog would be able to pick up on things that remain hidden to humans. There is nothing truly supernatural in this film but what Indy can detect goes so far beyond human ability that it might as well be. As we get glimpses of what has previously happened in the family home in which Todd’s (Shane Jensen) grandfather has died (and his own dog, Bandit, has disappeared in), Indy collects his own traces of this history through his sense of smell, through his superior hearing. From the beginning, when he and Todd move into the house in the woods on a rainy night, Indy is hesitant to enter, clearly sensing that this is not a good place. But he follows Todd regardless, because that’s what dogs do for the owners they love.

As much as the unravelling of the history is horrifying, bits and pieces of the truth coming to light as Indy explores his new environment – proving again and again that true bravery is doing something even though you’re scared - and as Todd speaks on the phone to Vera, his sister, in increasingly frustrated and aggressive conversations, the true horror of Good Boy lies in how Todd changes. All the hints at the truth – Todd’s coughing, his doctor’s appointments, his sister’s worries about something coming back, the plasters on his hand after he has left Indy for almost a whole day – register with the viewer and begin to form a coherent story of catastrophic illness (an illness shared by his grandfather and perhaps many more members of his family – in a walk through a family graveyard, Todd darkly says that many of them have died young). Indy isn’t capable of this interpretation, because he’s a dog, but what he does perceive is Todd being haunted by something, a creature made of mud or tar, first hiding in corners, then coming close enough to touch. Vera asks Todd about Indy’s behaviour, if he has shown signs of being disconcerted, because she has read that dogs can sense illness. Good Boy finds a visual language for that heightened perception, a personification of illness as a dark spectre that will, in the end, win out. 

Todd doesn’t want to discuss his health with his sister, and he can’t talk about what is happening to him to Indy, because it is language beyond the dog’s understanding. This is one of the most difficult realities of living with a dog: not being able to explain things, like how you will return after a certain amount of time has elapsed when you leave, or why they need to go to the vet for injections, even if they are terrified of them.
There is no way to explain to Indy why Todd needs more space to rest, why he is becoming increasingly more erratic. All Indy wants to do is protect him, and there is no greater horror in this film than the moment when Todd exiles Indy outside, chained to a dog house in the pouring rain, where he is forced to watch him struggle without being able to help. In a way, it’s a kind of horror that The Babadook also relied on – what happens when the person someone depends on entirely is shifting and changing into something unrecognisable and potentially dangerous, and there is no outside entity to appeal to for help? 

2025, directed by Ben Leonberg, starring Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin.