GOOD BOY Review: Indy the Dog Gives the Performance of the Year
On the first day of most film studies classes the prof will lay something called “The Kuleshov Effect” on you. It’s a common sense thing, but still someone had to prove it and name it — in this case an early Soviet filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov. The idea is that if you show an image of a face with “no expression” (even though that can’t really exist), then cut to something, then cut back to that original, the viewer will project a reaction depending on what was in the middle. Mentally, we fill in the blanks, and those blanks will be different if the intermediary image is a grotesque demon or a hot fudge sundae.
Nowhere is this technique in greater form than in pet videos online. Somebody says something dumb, you show the dog, and it seems like the dog is pissed off. 10 million hits on YouTube. I bring this all up because Good Boy, a new indie debuting on Shudder this week, certainly sounds like it is deploying Kuleshov effects from beginning to end. But that is not the case. The movie’s star, a dog named Indy, is not just looking cute for the camera while the director Ben Leonberg and editor Curtis Roberts place evocative images around it. This dog is acting.
Good Boy is, from a story perspective, a fairly simple haunted house picture. But from a storytelling perspective it is unlike anything you’ve seen before. The idea is that the main character (or at least what a foolish and speciesist person would consider the main character) brings a dog along during a plunge into darkness — and we experience everything from his dog’s point of view. What’s funny is that it took me until the after the 10-minute mark (I jotted this down) until I realized that I’d yet to see a person’s face in close-up, that all of humanity was treated like the adults in Peanuts. That’s how riveting a performance Indy the Dog gives in this movie.
Overheard phone calls, video messages, and a conversation or two with a neighbor give just enough of what we non-canines in the audience need to follow the plot. A nice enough seeming guy named Todd (Shane Jensen) has some kind of illness, and has just been released from the hospital and told to rest. Much to his caring sister’s dismay, he and his pooch (Indy!) leave Queens, New York and head to a (yes, yes) small cabin in the woods. The rustic spot belonged to Todd’s grandfather, an ornery ol’ cuss (indie horror legend Larry Fessenden) who left some old VHS tapes of himself ranting for Todd to watch.
As we will learn, Gramps died under mysterious circumstances, and “they never did find his dog.” Todd doesn’t give this info much consideration — he’s just looking for some time out of the city to convalesce, but, as I am sure you have experienced, animals know things. Try as Indy might to warn Todd that something is up, there’s that frustrating language barrier in the way.
The bulk of Good Boy is a marvel of imagery — crisp imagery in the woods and in an eerily lit small house. The engine runs on vibes instead of a delineated plot, but that’s perfect for a movie like this. A dog, after all, senses things more than they understand. They recognize trouble, they react to trouble. They can’t be bothered with lore.
At first Indy’s worries are focused on Todd and his health. This then shifts to the problem of what is going bump in the night. Good Boy’s sharpest turn is the manifestation of the supernatural. We’ve seen humans get haunted countless times. What does it look like when there is the spirit of another dog on the premises? (Should Good Boy prove to be a box office success, certainly a franchise involving cats, hamsters, maybe a haunted koi pond are all possible future entries, though they may prove even more difficult to shoot.)
Good Boy was produced slowly over the course of three years, but that enormous effort means that Leonberg and company can boast about the lack of computer generated enhancements to Indy’s performance. And it is a performance. Every reaction shot is rich with emotion, immediately shattering any disbelief that this character isn’t as in the scene as any highly trained actor would be. It’s a remarkable effect, and heaven only knows what the ratio of hits to misses it took to make this movie work as well as it does.
That said, yes, Good Boy is something of a gimmick film, but a really well-crafted one. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome, clocking in at just 73 minutes. And a fun part comes after, when audiences can argue over how much Indy the performer understood what Indy the character was going through. Regardless of how it all got there, the cumulative effect is one of the best performances of the year.
