Good Boy

Given the popularity of the horror genre and humanity's love of dogs, it was only a matter of time before some enterprising young filmmaker attempted to combine them. That's what Ben Leonberg has done in his directorial debut, with the addition of filming the story from the dog's perspective. While it's not first-person (first-doggo?), the unmistakable star is the heart-meltingly adorable Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. Every shot involves his eyeline, whether the camera is behind his head or straight into his eyes. To mix it up a bit, there are even a few overhead shots, where Indy walks into the center of the frame then looks up. To keep the focus on the titular good boy, Leonberg omits human faces from the frame. Despite Indy sharing almost every scene with his owner Todd (Shane Jensen), his face is always occluded by shadow or blocked by an object conspicuously placed between himself and the camera.

It's a strange choice; while dogs rely primarily on scent for recognition and bonding, sight plays a role. And even if it didn't, the unnatural lengths to which Leonberg goes to hide his main human actor ensures you'll never stop thinking about it. This necessitated a payoff in the finale, and while it technically does come, its emotional and narrative purposes are unsatisfying and murky, at best.

Further distancing ourselves from the conceit is the choice to include a bunch of understandable speech (specifically English). If the goal is to capture a dog's experience of a creaky, creepy house where the only other person is their severely ill owner, wouldn't it be more natural for the audience to not know the details of what's going on? Of course, that's inherently a less commercial film, and Shudder may not have paid for its wide theatrical release. But it's a far more interesting one. It's not as if the dialog adds all that much insight. It mostly informs us of the history of his late grandfather's secluded cabin, as well as the man's many dogs through the years. And through consistently dismissing the concerned phone calls from his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), it's clear Todd fled to that cabin to die alone, save for the company of his best friend.

Although Indy can tell his owner isn't well, he's preoccupied with exploring a haunted house. He sees shapes in the darkness, hears all manner of unexplained noises (including dogs barking in the basement), and has intense dreams involving Bandit, one of the long deceased dogs Todd's grandfather owned. Dog owners will nod along in agreement, as it literalizes their sense that whenever their dog is barking at nothing, there's something outside the bounds of human perception. All of Indy's senses are employed in those moments, driving home how much scarier the unknown is for a dog, as none of their information gathering sheds a speck of light on the situation. Even worse, they have limited ability to impact their environment. When Todd gets frustrated and closes the bedroom door with Indy on the other side, all he can do is bark. The same goes for the unseen cacophony in the basement; he even sees scratch marks on the door, as if a previous dog heard the same thing, confirming his own certainty that everything he's seeing is real.

But the narrative's overall direction is stated outright near the beginning. Vera notes that dogs have inexplicable premonitions, tapping into some other realm to know what's about to happen in this one. So of course many of the most intense scenes end with Indy going over to Todd just before he suffers one of his many, many coughing fits, or collapses on the floor, or some other reminder that he's ill. Over and over again, the formula repeats: Indy notices something (visually or aurally), tries to figure out what it is, cannot because he's a dog, it becomes more pronounced or threatening, the score intensifies, then...the tension breaks when it goes away or Todd enters the scene to ask Indy what he's doing. It's a fine setup, but it gets tiresome fairly quickly. Leonberg seems hemmed in by his premise, like he needed to stretch to even get to its breezy seventy-two minute runtime, implying this script would have been better suited to a thirty- or forty-minute short film. The subplots of his grandfather's dogs has no bearing on the plot, while the warnings of the kindly neighbor (Stuart Rudin) about the fox traps he deployed in the woods barely plays into the terror. And while the climax goes a lot bigger, the plot had already been diluted by all that treading water, lessening its impact.

What is impressive is how good it looks given its meager budget (Leonberg co-financed and co-produced it with his wife, Kari Fischer). Even a scene of Indy jumping into a bush off of a roof during a storm is quite convincing, despite obviously requiring some effect (it's so quick that I'm unsure if it was CGI or a dummy or clever composite or what). Leonberg and Fischer shot it in their own house over three years, giving it a lived in quality for only minimal effort, made easier by the audience being too focused on the stupendous star to worry about continuity of the production design.

That familiar territory was certainly a huge help for Indy, the couple's real-life dog. He has no acting training, and was the only canine performer in the whole film. They ensured his comfort and safety by shooting at most a few hours a night, and all the terror was crafted in post-production through editing and sound effects, so he was never stressed out. In a short, post-screening behind-the-scenes featurette, we actually see the raw footage of one of these scenes, and it's quite amusing to know that as Indy looks "anxiously" out the window, Kari is just off screen talking to him. Despite his lack of understanding of what's really going on, and all three's inexperience in performing/directing dog acting, he really is quite remarkable. Some of that is just the natural befuddled look on a Toller's face, but some of it is how well house trained he is, and how determined the humans are. Leonberg shared that for the aforementioned scene, it took a whole evening's shoot to get eight seconds of usable footage.

While the swing is admirable, not enough is done with the space afforded. The screenplay only really has one idea it hits over and over again. Its visual presentation is solid, but the execution isn't all that remarkable. And the both the voice acting from the humans and the dialog itself is quite bland and generic, refusing to shed any deeper light on the relationship between pet and person, despite the perfect setup to do so. It feels like a first draft idea, which makes sense as the production was so DIY and seems to have been made on a shoestring. Still, I appreciate the experiment, and eagerly await the inevitable sequel, Bad Kitty.