Good Boy

Director: Viljar Bøe (Norway). Year of Release: 2022

A man is cooking a gourmet meal. He chops the meat diligently before throwing the chunks into a frying pan. While these are frying, he slices exotic vegetables and adds them to the mix. It all looks like one of those meals which looks a whole lot better than it tastes. When he is done, he puts it in a dog bowl which he hands over to his guest Frank – a man dressed in a dog suit. After eating the food, Frank falls asleep at his master’s bed, while master flicks through a dating app.

Meanwhile, Sigrid is a poor student who has self-esteem problems and is struggling to cope with life. Her tinder profile says “If you have a pulse and two legs, then we’re well on our way.” While she’s on Tinder, she “meets” Christian, who is tall, handsome, and – as she learns later – incredibly rich. They arrange a date, where she arrives late wearing Adidas sweat pants and he is dressed in a suit. When Sigrid asks Christian if he’s a control freak, he denies it strongly.

Christian and Sigrid’s relationship develops quickly, despite the warnings of her flatmate Aurora. He invites her back to his place – a luxury cottage in the middle of nowhere, slightly reminiscent of the designer house owned by the evil family in Parasite. Christian and Sigrid finish the evening with unexceptional sex. In the morning, Sigrid is greeted by Frank – the man-dog who we have already met in the opening credits.

Christian tells Sigrid not to worry. Frank is just an old schoolfriend and survivor of child abuse who has been traumatised by life so much that he can only exist as a dog. Christian was the only one there for Frank and is actually doing him a favour. He tells Sigrid to take care that she respect Frank’s coping mechanisms and always treat him as she would a dog. Living as a dog is part of Frank’s healing process.

What makes everything so eerie is that Frank’s costume is so obviously badly made. He doesn’t look like a dog, but like a man in an ill-fitting dog costume. And yet the film plays everything straight as if everything which takes place is perfectly normal. The acting, both by Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen as the neurotic and eager to please Sigrid and Gard Løkke as the haughty Christian is good enough for us at least to go with the flow without asking too many questions.

Christian also swears that his relationship with Frank is not sexual. Many reviewers have insisted that there is no BDSM subplot going on here. Maybe I’m just naive, but I never expected there was. I just thought that it was the weird sort of thing which happens in this sort of film. Sigrid visits some websites showing man-on-man-in-a-dog-costume action just to be sure, but is placated enough to go on a weekend away with Christian and Frank in Christian’s remote summer cottage.

Good Boy is what it is. If you’re not prepared to go along with its bizarre premise, there’s little in there for you. But if you’re willing to accept its premise, it is both funny and wildly disturbing. As it heads patiently towards an increasingly distressing ending, with Sigrid feeling that she has to sleep with a knife under her pillow, you feel that what is happening may be slightly excessive, but not that its simply ridiculous.

Good Boy is also a serious comment on gaslighting and the amount of shit many women are prepared to go along with because society has taught them not to expect anything better. We go along with what is happening in the same way that Sigrid goes along with a situation in which the sense of danger. It is not that she is unaware of the danger of her situation, more that she does not believe that she deserves anything better.

The film only lasts 1¼ hours, which in these days of overlong bloated films with nothing to say is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is also disappointingly slight. It presents us with a thought-provoking idea which sticks in the mind, but does not really have the courage to do much more with it. By the time we get to the end, we’ve moved from a weird off-kilter Indie film to a much more predictable straightforward slasher film.

One thing at least. It shows a healthy level of contempt towards smooth rich men who insist on wearing suits. Despite her neuroses, Sigrid is a relatable character for whom we feel nothing but empathy. Christian is creepy from the get-go. Although we understand what she sees in him (given her lack of success in relationships lately, what she sees in anything with a pulse), we’re still screaming at the screen that this is someone who she should just not trust.

Good Boy is a Norwegian film, and you can see the overlap with the Dogme movement which seems to have run its course but was pretty big a couple of decades ago. It was never a cohesive movement, but had a combination of fantasy and social concern which are very visible here. Now Lars von Trier are not to everyone’s taste (I am a fan though), but it would be nice to think that they planted a seed which has germinated with films like this.

There are reasons enough to get frustrated by a film like Good Boy, but why make life harder for yourself than it already is? This is a nice diversion, and I doubt that you’ll see another film like it this year. It leaves much unsaid, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We don’t need to be spoonfed everything we see, especially in a film like this which encourages us to use our imaginations to dream up possibilities weirder than anything which can be depicted on screen.