Good Boy: doggy ghost story goes for creeping dread over shocks

Even 19th-century ghost story writers realised it was a cliché to have a dog being sensitive to spookiness before humans – so many tales have a moment where the dog is alert to a presence its master isn’t yet aware of. Now, here’s that often-used throwaway as a whole film.

Wayne Smith’s 1994 novel Thor was a werewolf story told from the viewpoint of a dog who realises his master is turning into a monster. Eric Red turned that into Bad Moon (1996) a little-liked film which ditched the book’s unique angle because it then seemed too difficult a film concept, and possibly because it was easier on a low budget and fast shooting schedule to direct Mariel Hemingway than a German Shepherd. Thirty years on, Ben Leonberg pulls off something closer to Smith’s idea, working with his own dog Indy in the lead.

Indy moves to a house in the country, where not all human presences are living, and Indy’s human companion Todd (Shane Jensen) is in the process of dying. Present on videotape is Todd’s grandfather (indie genre fixture Larry Fessenden), who died in the house – which has a family graveyard attached, and where spirits are always lingering. Something shadowy attaches itself to the dying man, while Indy is wary of mundane menaces (fox-traps set by a neighbour) and possibly an ancient evil which has littered the property with dog-bones.

One risk Leonberg takes is confining the film to a dog’s viewpoint. The camera stays at Indy’s level for most of the film, so that the humans are like the maid seen only as a pair of legs in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Overheard snatches of conversation sketch Todd’s situation but no one feels a need to explain the plot to a dog. The nature of the haunting is ambiguous almost to the end – and what threat can be made to a man who is dying anyway? The film uses doggy-vision tricks – even dreams from a dog POV – and noses around skirting boards after the manner of Skinamarink (2022), with the attention drawn to black-and-white images (blurry VHS horror films) on a buzzing television set as often as creeping tendrils of supernatural dark.

It’s a good, quiet little horror film – a study in creeping dread rather than shocks – but it’s also a thoughtful study of the bond between man and animal. And Indy, who I’d like to think was named after the sector of film Leonberg works in rather than that guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), is a real star.

► Good Boy is in UK cinemas 10 October.