In the horror genre, you’d be a fool to ignore the concerns of a dog. While cats are mainly lurking in dark spaces waiting to collaborate with the orchestra on a cheap jumpscare, dogs are quick to alert their owners of nefarious goings-on, acutely sensitive to threats whether they be human or not.
In the often ingenious new horror film Good Boy, a pet dog isn’t just an easily dismissed harbinger of evil, he’s also the main character. Like last year’s Presence, which saw Steven Soderbergh tell a ghost story through the lens of the ghost, and In a Violent Nature, which gave us a gory slasher as seen by the killer, we’re given a fresh perspective on a story that’s anything but, this time a haunted house horror as seen by Indy, a loyal retriever. He’s worried about his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen, whose face we barely see), who’s retreating to his grandfather’s remote cabin after an undefined medical crisis.
