Good Boy had its world premiere at SXSW on 8 Mar 2025
Good Boy begins as it intends to go on: with Indy the dog lying by the feet of his beloved owner Todd (Shane Jensen) and sensing a dark presence in the corner of the room. Todd’s sister Vera (Arielle Freedman) enters the New York Ciy apartment just in time to find Todd slumped unconscious, dripping blood from his nose and mouth. There follows a montage of home videos: Todd picking Indy up as a puppy and watching him grow, even as Todd himself gets sick; and finally man and dog being reunited as Todd is released from hospital to join Indy and Vera and clown with them in Central Park.
The rest of Ben Leonberg’s feature debut, which he co-wrote with Alex Cannon, is, like that apartment opening, focalised through Indy’s loving, loyal perspective, even as the action moves from the city to an old cabin in the woods where generations of Todd’s family had lived, died and been buried, and where his grandfather (Larry Fessenden) was also recently found dead, leaving behind not only a pile of horror VHSes and home videos, but also the house itself as Todd’s natural inheritance. Todd too – whose very name sounds like the German for ‘death’ – has evidently come here to die, and he gets ever more ill and irascible as the film goes on, curtly spurning Vera’s concerned offers down the phone to come and help, and even expressing irritation at his clinging best friend Indy. Meanwhile, in this house that Vera describes as ‘cursed’ and ‘haunted’, Indy again senses something in the shadows, something frightening and infernal that is closing in on Todd as it had on his grandfather.
Most ghost stories concern echoing loss and the uncanny incomprehensibility of death, but Good Boy shows this from the point of view of a creature whose alert sensitivity allows us to see the enigma of what is unfolding with fresh eyes – like the canine flashbacks in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984), only with far greater motivation and purpose. Indy – in fact director Leonberg’s dog – is tracked close by DP Wade Grebnoel’s camera often at low angles, with the human characters’ faces typically in shadow, out of focus, or indeed entirely out of frame, like the teachers in a Peanuts comic. For this is a dog’s world dominated by ground-level scents and sounds, and while Indy is not quite anthropomorphised like Scooby-Doo, nonetheless he is expertly wrangled to respond to the approaching spectre of mortality in a manner which the viewer will recognise as entirely canine, yet still find readily relatable. For Leonberg not only imagines the unraveling abstraction through Indy’s heightened perceptions, but even gives vivid expression, in shades of Sylvain Chomet’s Belleville Rendez-vous (2003), to Indy’s anxious dreams and inner life.
Here the deep bond between human and animal is tested to and beyond its limits, and the word ‘stay’, so commonplace on the lips of any dog owner, is made to resonate with something more mysterious, mournful and metaphysical. Good Boy is certainly filled with dread, and at times will make even the least frisky of viewers jump – but it is also haunting in a different sense, with a profound sadness to offset the fear, as both man and dog, in trying to do the best for each other, must cut the cord, or at least the leash.
As these two face the ineffable together, while surrounded by panned-and-scanned horror movies that serve as a Greek chorus on the transpiring tragedy, Leonberg offers us cinephilia for cynophiles, and an unusual way of looking at the processes of passing. For in the end, as at the beginning, this is about a dog watching over its ailing, dying master, and trying to keep at bay what both know – indeed what we all know – is coming. While the resistance may be futile, Indy’s doggedly quixotic efforts are precisely what makes him such an endearing animal protagonist – and such a good boy.
strap: Ben Leonberg’s sorrowful slice of cynophilia offers a dog’s alert, anxious perspective on the territorial encroachment of death
© Anton Bitel
