There are certain horror movie premises that seem like they can only be construed as a joke. That doesn’t mean the movie has to be a joke; there can humour, scares, even poignancy jammed in. But first and foremost you’re relating to it in the context of something slightly absurd, where the tagline contains its own punchline.

This is the apparent construction of Good Boy, playing at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, in which a standard (possibly too standard) horror movie plot is seen from the perspective of the family dog. And what a dog he is. You’d think this dog had studied with Stanislavski, so well does he know, and so well does he convey, his motivation in each scene.

The dog, though, is not funny, nor is anything else around him meant to be. This is a straightforward horror movie with two human characters, an adult brother and sister, whose faces are never seen clearly, kind of the visual equivalent of the adults in Peanuts, whom Charlie Brown and friends hear like an out of tune saxophone.

As little as we may need these characters, given how thinly drawn they are, it turns out a horror movie doesn’t work when it doesn’t have human surrogates through whom we can experience the terror. And so a movie that might have been better served as a short film struggles to flesh itself out to 73 minutes, which feels like an eternity given how little is going on.

We may not get a good look at him, but Shane Jensen plays the brother, who is seen coughing up blood in the opening scene, as writer-director Ben Leonberg fakes us out that we might already be in the thick of genre tropes, and this might be the killer’s first victim. Instead this man may just be the victim of an aggressive form of cancer, though what’s ailing him is only hinted at. His sister (Arielle Friedman) finds him unresponsive and checks him into hospital, where it’s more bad news in terms of possible cures.

Wanting to get away from it all, the man takes his loyal and adorable golden retriever, Indy (played by the director’s own dog, actually called Indy), out to his grandfather’s place in the woods, despite the fact that numerous people have died there, including his grandfather. Although this man is vaguely aware of a presence, it’s the dog we see sniffing around the house, staring ominously in corners at something unspeakable only he can see. Rooting around in the woods, he sees two shiny eyes looking back at him from the dark. Before all is said and done, black goo will make an appearance.

Indy is, quite simply, an astonishing dog actor. I suppose you have to attribute that to his trainers, and hope they weren’t required to do anything too egregious to stress him out and get him to emit that terrified whimpering. (A bit of cheating on the dog’s vocals may have been in order.) It’s not because Indy can’t carry this movie that Good Boy doesn’t work.

It’s that the human actors aren’t up to the canine’s level, and their dialogue is quite bad. So much time was devoted to developing the dog as a real character, a key component of this challenging central gimmick, that everything else, including the details of the horror plot, took a back seat.

And because Leonberg is in fact making this as a feature, it has to have a very slow lead up, a very gradual delivery of anything in the neighbourhood of scares. After our fifth or sixth false start on really getting the movie going, we lose our patience, and what finally comes of the wait wasn’t worth it.

The first MIFF showing was obviously filled with dog lovers, as there were plenty of audible reactions to cute dog moments (we see video of Indy as a pup, which is diabolically adorable), as well as gasps about potential dog peril. I mean, it’s a very good showcase for one hell of an expressive dog. As a movie, it’s wanting.

 

Good Boy has one more MIFF screening this Saturday at Hoyts Melbourne Central. Tickets can be purchased here.