Good Boy

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A golden-brown dog, backlit by warm light in a dark room, looks warily over its shoulder.

This is such, such a good boy.

No burying of the lede here either: the dog makes it. Breathe easy. You probably know the basic gist of this film if you’ve heard of it but, in case you haven’t, it’s a ghost story where the main protagonist is a dog named Indy who can see things that are threatening his owner which his owner obviously can’t, namely a weird mud creature in the house. Also, apparently this was the director’s own dog and it took 3 years to make this film due to how long they could work the pup each day.

I loved this movie. There were times where you weren’t sure whether to be afraid for Indy, be afraid for what Indy is seeing, or be afraid for Indy’s owner. This also felt like the most relatable movie so far for the most gut wrenching reasons…

If you’ve ever been sick, like REALLY sick, there can come a time where you just try to push it out of your mind. Sometimes you pretend it doesn’t exist. Then it gets worse, and worse until you break down and are forced to accept reality. Here is this guy, “the owner”, sitting in his grandfather’s haunted house, dealing with the fact that he’s going to die from this illness and all he can do is cry and hug his dog.

Now, that’s kind of where it starts to lose me as well. His illness is apparently a family thing - he says that “all of our family died pretty young”. It is revealed in flashbacks that his grandfather was suffering the same symptoms when the creature in the house came for him and HIS dog. Nothing else about this hereditary haunting is explained unless I just failed to pick up more from this film, but at a run time of ~1:10-1:20, I don’t think there was much to miss. I know the whole point is the dog, but if the rest was just a bit more fleshed out, it could’ve been perfect. For now, I think it’s just great.

Score: B+