Good Boy is a haunted house movie told almost entirely from the perspective1Not the POV, as I’ve heard and read some people say of a dog. It seems like a can’t fail premise. Even the most callous and jaded horror movie-goers are likely to feel more empathy for a pet as the main character than they would for a human that’s responsible for making dumb decisions.
Dumb decisions like moving into an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, once occupied by your creepy grandfather who died after going kind of crazy and cutting himself off from everyone. That’s what the main human in this movie does, dragging his dog Indy with him, and I never forgave him for it.
The movie is a small, independent production, shot mostly by a man and his wife using their real-life house as the setting and their real-life dog as the star. After the credits finish, there’s a good behind-the-scenes bit where the director explains how they made the movie, explaining that the shoot took over three years because they only worked with Indy for a few hours each day. He stresses repeatedly that Indy had no idea he was in a horror movie, and that any shots of him looking scared or stressed out were the result of careful editing.
I suspect that was less intended as “lessons of the magic of film” than “no honest we didn’t do anything that could harm or even worry this very good dog.” And that’s good, but I’m not so sure about the “he’s not acting” part. That dog can emote and I would swear that he looked genuinely scared in places.
As much as I appreciate everything that went into the making of the movie, it turned out to be really difficult for me to watch. I was nervously checking my watch and even tempted to walk out. I don’t know if other people, even animal lovers, will be that upset about it, but I felt like it was specifically hitting all of my triggers.
I’m still not sure why I didn’t trust my gut, since when I first saw the trailer, my immediate reaction was “hell no there’s no way I’m seeing that, why would anyone even make that?” But I figured that feeling upset and uneasy is what horror movies are all about. I think I underestimated just how much I get upset not just at medical issues, but at seeing a dog frightened, upset, or reacting to being (pretty mildly) mistreated.
And honestly, that’s entirely on me, because Good Boy is exactly what it says in the trailer: a scary haunted house movie where a dog is the main character.
I have to say I was a little confused for much of it, not sure if it was trying to put me in the mindset of a dog who couldn’t figure out what was going on, or if it was just confusing in its imagery. I spent much of the movie trying to figure out if the ghosts were just a metaphor for illness, or if they caused the illness in the first place, never quite sure if the movie was trying to be symbolic on top of having a gimmick at its core. I kind of wish they hadn’t bothered with that ambiguity, to be honest, and had just made it a more straightforward haunted house story.
In any case, it was one of those movies that I think I respected more than I enjoyed, and I’d still recommend it to anybody other than the extremely sensitive. And if you’re wondering whether you’re too sensitive to enjoy the movie, I’ve got some explicit spoilers about what happens below:
(Spoilers for Good Boy to give an idea of possible triggers)
Indy makes it through the movie fine, but then, doing otherwise would’ve been inexcusable, and I wouldn’t be writing this. I don’t believe he’s even injured. He does get mistreated by his owner by getting left alone for a day, yelled at, and left out in the rain. He does get caught in a trap but seems unharmed. And he spends a lot of the movie frightened.
A different dog does die, but it’s offscreen in the past and isn’t shown explicitly. There is a suggestion of violence towards that dog near the beginning, but by the end, that seems to be more of a vision than the reality of what happened.
And for the human: he has some sort of consumptive disease that seems like it might be lung cancer.
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