I really do not like spoiling movies before people have a chance to see them so SPOILER ALERT ABOUT THE DOG AND ONLY ABOUT THE DOG: Indy, the dog, remains unharmed in Good Boy.
If you’ve kept reading past the spoiler alert, then get on board for one of the most haunting, beautiful, touching, devastating movies about the bond between man and man’s best friend with a supernatural twist and a performance by the goodest by for the ages, in Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy that he also co-wrote with Alex Cannon. This movie is not for the weak, or if you’ve recently lost somebody in your life – it’s an incredible daunting hard watch that once it’s made abundantly obvious what is happening it becomes one of the most gut wrenching and depressing movies of the year.
It is not so much a horror film for the human, but it is a horror film for our leading man, Indy, as he is trying to protect his human as otherworldly forces are clearly out to get him. From Indy’s perspective, he doesn’t understand why these ghoulish creatures are trying to take his human away, but from the audience perspective – right out of the gate — we are aware that the human companion here is sick, and even with a doctors visit were privy to seeing, it’s still from Indy’s POV meaning we don’t ever get to hear what the diagnosis is just that treatment is futile and the human is approaching the final door.
The movie just focuses on Indy, never showing us, human characters faces (almost for the entire feature) as he has been relocated with his human to a rural home on the outskirts of town. Everything we see is from his perspective or from his surroundings, it’s rare we see something focused on him or from a different POV. There are mysterious forces at foot, that keep trying to take away his human, and Indy has to try his hardest to ensure that nothing happens to his beloved human. The way that Alex Cannon and Ben Leonberg construct this story of death and grief, is so heart wrenchingly beautiful that it becomes a difficult watch – no one expects to be sitting there quietly sobbing through what is billed as a horror film, but here we find ourselves just left in a puddle of emotions from the gravitas of this situation. Indy’s entire life is being ripped away from him, from forces he cannot understand but sees them lurking, trying to get his human away from him in what ends up being one of the most haunting, passionate, and realistic takes on grief and death on screen in some time.
Good Boy may be the title of Ben Leonberg’s feature but Indy is truly the definition of a good boy, proving that performance and acting comes from a combination of actors being able to work with the material they’re given and directors knowing how to get the best out of their cast because without a doubt Indy delivers one of the best performances of the year. Genuinely, Good Boy cannot be understated as one of the most haunting beautiful and upsetting movies of the year that features a performance that will go down in history as one of the best to ever do it whether be canine or human.
