Review: Good Boy
Digital: Good Boy (2022)
Christian (Gard Løkke) is a young multimillionaire who lives in a large house left to him by his parents. Sharing the house with him is his “dog” Frank, who we see from the very beginning of the movie is in fact somebody dressed up in a fake dog costume, though committing to the role by walking on all fours, eating from a dog bowl and generally doing everything that Christian tells him to do.
Scrolling through Tinder on his phone, Christian gives a “superlike” to Sigrid (Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen), a young woman who works as a cashier while trying to complete a 1 year diploma course.
Upon hitting it off on their first date, Christian takes Sigrid to his home and she stays the night, only to awake the next morning to the sight of Frank at the bottom of the bed. She of course is highly disturbed by this revelation that Frank’s dog is not what she was expecting and she leaves…though her interest in Christian is peaked once more when her flatmate (after seeing Christian’s Tinder photo on Sigrid’s phone) tells her of Christian’s immense wealth.
Inviting Sigrid to the family cabin in the woods, Christian and Frank both have startling revelations for her after they’ve arrived…none of which are very pleasant at all.
A short 76 minute running time keeps everything moving along at a decent enough pace, though not too fast to ruin any build up of tension as the oppressive atmosphere begins to build and the viewer is left wondering what the hell is going to happen next, with knives hidden, phones taken away, cages opened and a general sense of “WTF!?” throughout.
My main gripe about the movie (without explicitly coming out with it and giving a plot spoiler) is that it falls into a horror movie trope that really annoys me every time I see it, suffice it to say that it involves the protagonist (99% of the time a female) never taking advantage of a certain situation over the antagonist.
Apart from the above gripe and a couple of big plot holes, I enjoyed Good Boy and was always invested into how it would all end, which while not being something completely gobsmacking, was a decent enough conclusion to what had gone before.
