An exercise in empathy that transforms the look of a dog into a unique film. Why ‘Good Boy’ “redefines contemporary horror cinema”

Newly arrived as a film that reformulates the codes of terror from simplicity and risk, ‘Good Boy’ is the debut of the American director Ben Leongwhich turns an unusual resource – telling a haunted house story from the eyes of a dog – into a hypnotic cinematic experience.

Filmed for more than three years and starring Hindi, the filmmaker’s own dog, the film does not rely on digital effects or easy tricks: its strength is in the staging. leong literally lower the camera to the groundat the level of the animal, to show a distorted, disturbing and, at the same time, deeply emotional world.

Canine experiment

In the new installment of ‘Alex’s critique’, our colleague Alejandro G. Calvo shows his enthusiasm for ‘Good Boy’, a film that surprised him from the first moment he saw it at the Sitges Festival. Although I thought it was “and slasher told from the dog’s point of view”then discovered “a horror story much more intelligent and emotional than it appears”. For Calvo, what differentiates Ben Leong’s work is precisely his technical and conceptual viewthat simple gesture – lowering the camera to the level of a dog’s eyes – that generates a new way of narrating fear.

“The concept of everything being told from the dog’s point of view seems very powerful to me”says Calvo, highlighting the enormous risk of maintaining that approach for 80 minutes. In his analysis, he emphasizes that Leong “has achieved something that could have remained a short experiment, but that works like a feature film full of tension, emotion and even tenderness”.

One of the aspects that fascinated him the most was the use of off-fielda tool that, according to him, works and helps maintain the mystery. “Since the camera is low, at the height of a dog, when someone appears you only see their knees, “You don’t know if it’s a human being or a demon.”he explains. That limited point of view becomes the film’s greatest strength, creating a suggested type of horror that plays with the viewer’s imagination.

But Calvo does not stop at the staging alone: ​​he also praises Leong’s ability to give the animal a real cinematic expressiveness. “The close-ups of the dog convey a lot of emotions”he says, recalling the famous Kuleshov effect. “With the juxtaposition of images, the filmmaker achieves that Hindi It transmits fear or sadness to you even if it is calm. “It’s pure cinema.”. For Calvo, this handling of editing is what transforms ‘Good Boy’ into such a special piece: an exercise in visual and emotional empathy that redefines contemporary horror cinema.

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