New tricks: "Good Boy"

The horror renaissance has developed such momentum that creatives, moneymen, distributors and exhibitors alike are being encouraged to take chances on complete curveballs. Ben Leonberg's debut Good Boy has been positioned as Hallowe'en 2025's foremost novelty item: a film not only pieced together on a shoestring over 400 days in the woods of New Jersey - conjuring memories of the most notorious horror breakout of recent times, 1999's The Blair Witch Project - but also one that happens to feature in the lead role the writer-director's own dog, a retriever called Indy. Its set-up requires some feeling out, which is doubtless what happens when a film's protagonist can't bark exposition every five minutes. Indy's owner (played here by Shane Jensen) is a young man suffering from some form of lung disease who - seeking the fresh air, nature and quiet that might aid his recovery - relocates from the city to a cabin in the woods previously owned by his late grandfather. (Old home videotapes left behind reveal gramps is played by Larry Fessenden, the Jack Nicholson of low-budget horror cinema, lending his seal of approval to the project - while also setting us to worry what grim fate awaits the new arrivals.) Naturally, pooch is quicker than his doped-up handler to realise something's amiss: as if the creaky, dusty, generally underlit location weren't in itself enough to unsettle, we also learn it's hunting season out this way, and it's not long before a third party appears under the bed, Indy's preferred hiding spot. Put it like this: this is one of those productions where the boilerplate "no animals were harmed" disclaimer in the closing credits cues a bigger than average sigh of relief.

Looked at one way, the results aren't quite so novel: it was only a couple of years back that critics were cooing over a stoic donkey's turn in Jerzy Skolimowski's Bresson update EO, although that film was striving for sociological significance, where Leonberg is making spooky-season popcorn fare. Indy nevertheless gives a stronger, more expressive performance than many of the current cinema's better-paid leading men: Leonberg's handsome close-ups pick the dog's bright, sometimes worried-looking eyes and wet nose out of the cabin's faintly Vermeerish light. (Faced with this or Manson-eyed Jared Leto playing some kind of artificial intelligence, I know which screen I'm heading into.) Indy is, indeed, a good boy - playing scampering curiosity whenever his director asks him to, yelping loneliness when the situation calls for that - in a pet project assembled with visible love: one of the movie's passing achievements is that it explained to me, a non-dogowner, why dogowners get the way they do about their dogs, and - in certain cases - insist upon turning their cameras on their dogs. The surprise is how accomplished Good Boy is from a dramatic perspective: after a reel or so of hokey, bumps-in-the-night stuff, it develops into a potent little metaphor for the agonies of watching a loved one slip away from you when there's nothing much you can do about it. Indy is no sentimental Lassie figure, bounding through to save the day through sheer force of personality, although this script affords him a kind of ESP - or animal empathy - which permits Leonberg to trick this story out with Lynchian visions and nightmares. If the whole still falls on the spare side - 73 minutes, scant dialogue beyond "sit" or "stay", a cast of one man and his dog - it's effective and affecting, and certainly more effective and affecting than the technical exercise of Steven Soderbergh's Presence. Indy deserves a treat; so, too, does his owner.

Good Boy is now playing in selected cinemas.