Good Boy Is a Horror Film About Grieving

A low budget love letter to a good dog.

“I think it comes from a thought or maybe worry every dog owner has had, which is, ‘Why is my dog barking at nothing or staring at nothing?’” Ben Leonberg said of the inspiration for his horror-film-with-dog-protagonist Good Boy. But while the film certainly has a lot of frames of Leonberg’s Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever staring at nothing, it’s less about the absence you can’t see, and more about the absence that you know is coming. It’s hard to live with a dog and not think, at least occasionally, about having to say goodbye to that dog. Which is to say, like many ghost stories, Leonberg’s presents itself as horror as a way to sucker-punch you with grief.

The low budget 73-minute film, made for only $70,000, borrows stylistic cues from found footage movies like Paranormal Activity or Blair Witch Project, though it doesn’t use the video camera conceit. Todd (Shane Jensen) is suffering from a serious lung illness; after spitting up blood and a hospital stay he decides (rashly) to go to his grandfather’s cabin in the woods to try to forget his illness.

Todd refuses to credit his sister warnings from his concerned sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) that the cabin is haunted. His trusty dog Indy, though, knows something’s not right; he whines at strange shapes and lights and won’t leave Todd alone for a second, even when his owner wants to use the bathroom. Unbeknownst to Todd, Indy also sees a strange mud-covered figure lurking on the grounds and in the house, not to mention the ghost of Todd’s grandfather’s dog Bandit. Bandit disappeared after the grandfather (Larry Fessenden) died; on VHS tapes granddad left behind, the older man has an ugly sounding cough mch like Todd’s.

Good Boy is very much Indy’s film, which means that the dog is performing for the entire run time and has to carry the narrative largely by himself. The orchestration of dog performance (stares and whines and occasional bursts of barking or leaps through windows) with special effects *(lights and noises and banging doors) is an impressively scrappy feat of filmmaking—though the actual narrative beats and jump scares are somewhat rote when they’re not shaky. As soon as neighbor Richard (Stuart Rudin) shows up and mentions he’s set fox traps, you know what’s going to happen with those traps later in the film. Similarly, Todd’s downward spiral, physically and mentally, is familiar from The Shining and innumerable knock-offs—which is fortunate since Jensen is not a compelling actor, and if you didn’t already know the story from better versions, neither he nor the sporadically coherent script could sell it.

These technical details aren’t really the point of the film, though. Despite its genre garb, it’s hard not to conclude that Good Boy is an excuse for Leonberg to spend a lot of time recording his beloved dog as Indy races around the woods and the house. The movie is essentially a wall-to-wall dog reaction shot; you’re mostly there not to be scared, and not even to follow a story, but simply to spend time with Leonberg and his best good boy.

Ghost stories are often also love stories, and while Leonberg is certainly celebrating his relationship with Indy, he’s also thinking about that relationship’s end. The conceit of the film is that it’s the human who’s prematurely departing; the human-mud figure is both coming for Todd and turning into him, the way that death is both a destination and an embodiment. As the danger gets closer, Todd and the monster become less separable; he snaps at Indy and punishes him. For dogs, as for humans, the greatest fear is often that the person you love most will turn on you.

One way the person or the dog you most love turns on you is of course by dying. Mud monsters and things that go bump in the night are scary. Not nearly as scary, though, as having to go on living day after day after day, year after year, knowing the being who loved you most in the world, who never left your side, had to go on where you can’t follow. “You’re a good dog,” Todd tells Indy. “Boy, you can’t save me.” There is no love without goodbye; there is no pet without a ghost—except perhaps for the last, which is the one you haunt yourself. Good Boy isn’t a great horror movie. It’s got a core of sadness, though, that is hard to leave behind.