Good Boy (2025)

PG-13.  Apparently, I went on a PG-13 horror kick without planning it.  This is a movie that I genuinely thought was R because it had an f-bomb along with another use of language.  There's also enough blood and messed up stuff in the movie that I thought was going to earn this film a mild-R rating.  It's one of those movies that makes you say, "That's a pretty intense PG-13."  But because I'm a bad dad, I watched it on a plane next to my kid, who was really into Dora the Explorer on her screen.  It was also so dark and there's not that much messed up stuff in it. 

DIRECTOR: Ben Leonberg

Hey guys!  Am I writing quickly today?  After all, I did say that I had way too many of these blogs to write, so clearly I wrote like my life depended on it.  The answer is: No.  I am writing very slowly and am having great difficulty right now with all of this ahead of me.  Don't worry, I only have to collect essays tomorrow to grade, so that's probably going to ruin my week.   Still, even if I make baby steps into catching up on my blog, I'm going to do my darndest.  Either that or fall asleep, which sounds way better right now.

I was waiting for this one.  I think I like the idea of a gimmicky horror movie more than I actually enjoy the movie.   I often think that meta horror movies have a lot of potential, but the reality of the situation is that they probably don't make movies like Good Boy too often for a reason.  I am linking Good Boy to In a Violent Nature.  For people who have seen In a Violent Nature know what I'm talking about, but for people who haven't, I'll explain.  In a Violent Nature takes the old summercamp slasher, like Friday the 13th, and shows the events from the killer's perspective.  I like the idea of that a lot.  It changes what we assume a formulaic horror movie has to be and tips it on its head.  But like with In a Violent Nature, there's something missing.  With In a Violent Nature, the idea gets a little stale.  It literally has to pan away from the killer just to make the film make sense.  Good Boy has a little bit of the same problem.  With Good Boy, there's almost no reason to make the protagonist a dog in the film.

That's a weird take, but let me explain.  The use of pets in horror movies has always been "They see things we can't see."   They are a tool of storytelling saying that something is on the horizon and the tension is going to build up until the thing that the dog sees is going to be visible by people.  I kind of like that as a concept for a film.  If we get to see what the dog sees from minute one, then there's something new.  We get to see why they can see through the veil and there might be a new perspective on the ghost story.  Good Boy...doesn't do that.  I mean, we get the haunting immediately.  I don't deny that.  But instead of seeing the haunting of humanity though the dog's eyes, this is really a story about the dog surviving the same thing that a human would.  This is a bit harsh, but you could have made the protagonist a human and the story might play out exactly the same.  Because it's not that the demon is haunting just the human.  The demon is also haunting the dog.  I kind of wish that the demon just didn't care about the dog.  The dog should be inconsequential.

And that's kind of where the story falls apart.  Like with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I'm going to complain about this movie a lot only to remind you that I kind of had a good time watching it.  Unlike The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, I do think that Good Boy is a good movie.  It just lacks greatness. It's when my imagination goes to a place that the film doesn't that I get disappointed.  And here's where I have to have my come-to-Jesus moment: Maybe the original version of this movie tried that and ran into a roadblock.  After all, I'm basically asking the film to invent a new drama.  That's wildly unfair of me.  But this new genre wouldn't be horror so much as it would be horror adjacent.  Because in the background of this movie about a dog that sees things would be a full-sized horror movie.  Instead, when we make the movie about the dog being haunted, it's just transferring the focus.  If anything, the gimmick doesn't become about a dog.  Instead, the gimmick is really about how the protagonist can't communicate what is happening to it. This is an irresponsible stretch, but it becomes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for horror movies.  And that's fine.  But I see this movie as having all of this potential and none of it is really being tapped.  We know that we probably aren't having another horror movie from the dog's perspective without it at least acknowledging that this movie exists.

But if I accept all of the things that I wrote, complaining about the fact that this is just a standard horror movie with the exception of a dog as the protagonist, does the movie work?  I mean, mostly.  There's some kind of cool things that have a bittersweet element to them.  (The amount of dancing that I threw in there to avoid "double-edged sword" was astounding.) When the protagonist is a dog, we are limited by what the protagonist can do.  If anything, the sheer amount of agency that is removed from the protagonist is unique.  Usually, we can yell at the screen and critique bad choices that the hero makes is part and parcel of horror movies.  The audience is left having to accept a lot of choices because, again, a dog.  I'm sure that there were audiences out there screaming at the dog as well, but more as a stressed out life-coach as opposed to offering criticism.  After all, he is a "good boy."  But part of hauntings are the protagonists trying to figure out what the mystery of the haunting is.  After all, if you are going to shut the whole thing down, you have to have insight into what the problem actually is.  But a dog can't do that.  (I'm writing this sentence a lot.  I mean, Air Bud swears that there's nothing that says that the dog can't do that.) As an audience, we have to write a lot of mythology for that mud monster.  

The cool part about the mud monster is that it seems like the filmmakers depend a lot on metaphor and symbolism.  If you watch this as a supernatural film, and only as a supernatural film, there's implication that Todd is being poisoned by this creature out in the woods that killed his father as well.  It makes the entity vague and ambiguous and I think that read of the movie leaves something to be desired.  However, if we use the entity as a symbol for something more universal, there's actually something cool going on here.  If that is true, Good Boy becomes a commentary on mortality.  I'm not saying that we're going full Seventh Seal here, but I don't hate that comparison.  When the depiction is seen as supernatural, we see that the mud creature is corrupting Todd.  But we never really see Todd as a nice guy until his death.  A little bit death-bed repentance.  But as a metaphor, we get to see the ill at their most vulnerable.  It explains why Todd and Vera don't like their grandfather's cabin.  (I may have called him Todd's father earlier.  I don't quite know which is true.) Again, my job is to make some crazy stretches on this blog, but that helplessness that the dog has is something that we all feel in the shadow of illness.  There is a line --and as far as I understand, it's true --that says that dogs can smell illness on people.  The notion that Indy is afraid of the illness that stalks and surrounds Todd.  Yes, there are moments in the film where straight up supernatural things happen.  I think these moments are to mkae the creature more frightening than a slow moving cancer.  But I like the fact that we don't need this ancient mythology, a la The Evil Dead.  Nope.  Todd has a genetic disease that killed his grandfather.  It just so happens to have happened in the same house, imbuing the audience with a sense that the house is haunted when, instead, this is just a place that a family has experienced tragedy in.

While The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was actively bad, this movie just didn't live up to its potential.  But the things that it gets right, it seems to get really right.  Yeah, I wish that we had a new subgenre of film.  But even if the demon is stalking the dog instead of just being something in the background, that's okay to me.  I like the imagery.  I like the dog.  I'm not even a pet person and I was all about protecting this good boy.  So, yeah, kind of worth it.