Am I reviewing it? Kind of but also the movie is mostly interesting because of things we are not seeing on the screen.

Note that I am not a dog owner nor have I ever owned a dog. I have, obviously, interacted with dogs in the past, so they are not a complete mystery to me.

Good Boy is a horror film about Indy, a dog, whose owner moves to the countryside to the house of his dead grandfather, after a medical emergency. Indy has to keep his owner safe from an unknown force that seems to haunt the house and it’s surroundings.

People don’t seem to like this very much. It has 6.1 on IMDb. That’s not horrendous for a horror movie but still pretty low. Also, it is understandable. The movie is only just over 70 minutes and yet it feels pretty slow. The problem here being that I started to think about things outside of the screen.

First, the theme is strong. Dogs are unknowable. They sense the world differently to us so they react to things we don’t even see or hear or, especially, smell. So, if we monitor them to see what they are doing, we wouldn’t really know why. And this is a nice premise for a movie. Is it actually workable? Based on this, I would say it’s a strong maybe. Overall, this would probably have worked better as a short but the financial reality is different.

Second, I started to think about how difficult the whole thing must have been. The dog doesn’t know what’s going on. Depending on it’s training, it might very well just do whatever it pleases, and even if it knows a bunch of tricks, those might not be applicable to making a movie where it needs to be natural. After all, most tricks are not natural to dogs. I would also guess that you can’t really force the dog to work too many hours per day.

Turns out, the small team (apparently mostly the director, the main actor and the dog) spent 400 days shooting the movie. That’s Kubrick numbers. A small movie like a horror or romcom will generally wrap in like 30 days and bigger project might have like 90 with something like a Marvel movie probably having many more but probably nowhere near 400.

So, was it worth it? Again, the movie is more interesting than good. It is unique. I like how it captures the point of view of a dog. We don’t, for example, really faces of people, because the dog is looking at the world from a much lower angle and it might not even distinguish people based on faces (I would assume that smells are a much better identifiers for them but that is just a guess).

I kind of liked it but as you can see, I chose to write about periphery of the movie rather than the movie itself, so take that as you will.