Good Boy Review – Crafty Supernatural Horror Leads with a heroic dog | Horror movies

IN the horror morning, you would be a fool to ignore the worries of a dog. While cats are mainly lurking in dark spaces that wait to work with the orchestra on a cheap Jumpscare, dogs quickly warn their owners of nasty good, acute sensitive to threats, whether they are human or not.

In the often ingenious new horror film Good Boy, a dog is not only an easily fired harbinger of evil, he is the main character. Like last year Presencewho saw Steven Soderbergh tell a ghost story through the lens of the Spirit, and In a violent natureWho gave us a bloody slasher as seen by the murderer, we get a new perspective on a story that is anything but a spooky house horror as seen by Indy, a loyal retriever. He is worried about his owner Todd (Shane Jensen, whose face we hardly see), who withdraw into the remote hut of his grandfather after an undefined medical crisis.

Something has already been pursued by the hut, filled with memories of Todd’s family and the dogs they had before Indy, told through creepy old video tires that were mysteriously filmed and stored, but something else lurkes in the shade. Indy is loyal to a mistake, never too far from his owner, but as the behavior of Todd starts to become alarming, gets sicker if he stays there longer, how good a boy can be Indy?

It turns out to be one terribly Good boy, rather brilliantly played by another very good boy, the real dog of director Ben Leonberg, also known as Indy. Without the help of every digital deception (the film is small and ultra low budget) he is our eyes and ears everywhere, anxious reacting to bumps in the night and an owner who seems to have a transformation in Jack Torrance style in the hands of the house and the spirits in it. It is clear that Leonberg is changing a gimmicky liftpitch with the trust of the dog by his side and changes Indy that a kind of confused child represents, unable to understand the disintegrating behavior of his owner, without any real option, but to stay on his side. Leonberg finds a number of useful ways to adjust the construction and perspective of well-known spooky house scenes, late-night shadow exploration and basement control under the guidance of a main character handicapped by his instincts and priorities, as well as a non-rejecting loyalty that risks his safety. There is a sadness about how steadfast he stays, even if the person he has programmed to protect, may be the one he needs protection against, a refusal to give up someone who loses his mind and perhaps soul. Leonberg also weaves in the expected contemporary genre trope – with the help of a supernatural power to represent a little more grounded, a treacherous form of generation trauma, an inescapable rot – but without the turbidity of his colleagues.

But even in a short 73 minutes, Good Boy can feel stretched, a film that you never completely convince that a short would not have worked better. Although Indy is a remarkably expressive dog, there are only so many variations on dialogue -free scenes in which he looks at a strange noise in the dark and the cycle quickly becomes repetitive, so that a script is exposed that is a bit on the thin side. The exhibited craft, however, convinces that Leonberg has some other laziere, Jumpscare-driven horror filmmakers currently do not possess, showing off with a considerably elevated story and technical performance and it usually brings it home with an appropriate melancholic final. His debut serves best as a spicy announcement of what he can do with so few, and big things are clearly for him. I just hope he takes Indy with him.