Good Boy (2025, Ben Leonberg)

57/100

Had mistakenly gotten the impression that Good Boy amounts to Halloween (or pick your slasher film of choice) with a canine Final Girl. Was not expecting "What if Danny in The Shining had been a dog?" No complaints whatsoever about Leonberg's execution of that novel idea, nor about Indy's "performance"; it's a genuine accomplishment to simulate the perspective of a non-talking (even in voiceover) animal, getting all the necessary actions and apparent reactions from a creature who has no idea what a movie even is, much less that he's starring in one. And yet...this is kinda dumb, isn't it? Good Boy veers dangerously close to "In the end, the real monster was [SPOILER]," and my engagement level waned once that became fully apparent, which occurred for me with a good half hour to go (out of a gratifyingly swift 73 minutes total, so pretty near the midpoint). Plus there's some flagrant cheating-for-the-sake-of-scares w/r/t that unavoidable reading—an effort that doesn't even work, because I'm not on edge anymore once I know that [SPOILER]. (Though I did jump at the bloody hand petting/grabbing Indy.) And on top of that, I dunno, it's just very hard for me to swallow a dog having nightmares of this sort (I'm aware that animals dream, and they probably do have nightmares, but not, like, Carrie's-hand-emerging-from-the-grave-to-strangle-you nightmares) and experiencing demonic visions and so forth. 'Cause it's a dog, and it's a metaphor. Certain stretches of the film work well as a projection of Indy's anxiety about Todd (I'm thinking particularly of the camouflage-clad neighbor), but Leonberg's dead-set on evoking standard horror-movie tropes, as opposed to fashioning a purely tonal analogue à la, say, Durkin's The Nest. Of course, virtually nobody would have seen that hypothetical film. I'm really quite good at asking "Why not kill your box office by doing this?"