Over the last few years there’s been a wave of horror films that explore a nonhuman, human-adjacent or otherwise partial perspective to build a dispersed sense of illbience, often intercut with a melancholy or elegiac quality. We see it in Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, which explores a night house from the perspective of a very young toddler, Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, which retells a slasher film from the viewpoint of the slasher, and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, a ghost story shot from the ghost’s point of view. All of these films seem to draw on the peculiar dispersed horror of lockdown, especially the pandemic’s alternation between confined domestic spaces and drifting, directionless lines of flight into the wilderness. Good Boy, the latest film in this wave, takes on the perspective of a dog. Director Ben Leonberg plays Todd, a substance abuser who is suffering from a chronic lung disease and retreats to his late grandfather’s rural property with his dog, Indy. Again, we see an alternation between confined domesticity and sprawling nature, inflected, appropriately, through a debilitating respiratory condition, along with the same sense of melancholy foreclosure of earlier films in this movement.
Of course, the big difference here is the dog’s perspective – and the aptly named Indy also happens to be Leonberg’s own Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, meaning there is a special synergy between the two main characters in the film. The setup has a lot of potential, for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, there are so many crime cases where the animal saw it all and so forms a mute witness: “If only they could talk.” Likewise, Good Boy taps deep into the mystery of animal perception, especially those animals, like dogs, that are close to humans. Much of the screenplay is driven by Indy’s inchoate sense that something is off, along with his curiosity and inquisitiveness, which draws him to refracted representations of himself, such as a stuffed fox in Todd’s grandfather’s cabin, or to Todd’s iPhone and television; at times, Leonberg seems to be questioning in what sense Indy might be aware of his camera. The film also attempts to imagine the strangeness of the canine sensorium and Indy’s attunement to phenomena that remain beneath the threshold of human perception. The best moments are when we glimpse Indy’s different ways of processing the world, such as during a thunderstorm when a supernatural entity emerges that is invisible to Todd. Leonberg is also faced with a paradox – he is working in a primarily visual medium but dogs are most connected to the world through scent, the sense organ that ramifies least for humans. For that reason, he uses a variety of techniques to help us “see” smell, such as tracking-shots that occlude human faces, a persistent blurring of visuals, and blooms of visual intensity that seem to coincide with particularly strong scents.
However, while Good Boy really works as a dog’s-eye perspective of the world, the horror stuff needs a bit more development. For the most part the horror is fairly mild, presumably because Indy can’t consent to shock or jump scares (and of course, Leonberg is keen to steer clear of animal cruelty, especially with his own dog). All of that makes this quite a gentle film at heart, barely horror in the end, and more of a melancholy tragedy, since the twist is that the supernatural entity that Indy glimpses is actually a figure for the terminal cancer that is eating away at Todd’s body; he smells the cancer before anyone else can see it. In the end, I thought this worked best as an eccentric vision of the synergy between man and animal, such as during the closing credits, which feature home footage of Indy hanging out the window of the car, apparently on the way from, or to, a shoot in the woods, before someone, most likely Leonberg himself, whistles him back inside. It tops off the mildest of these recent exercises in horror ambience – I would have liked just a little more edginess – albeit still a charming film in is own right, possibly destined as a classic for parents and kids.