Good Boy

A fresh and unsettling take on creepiness, gradually blurring the lines between normal and unnatural. As the story unfolds, I found myself sympathizing with the protagonist's desire for love, despite the bizarre situation at her boyfriend's home. The film creates a thrilling atmosphere, keeping you on edge as the tone shifts from sweet to chilling to psychotic, with each new development heightening the tension. The unexpected twist leaves a lasting impact, leaving me still puzzled by its strange conclusion. A strong, captivating effort by the director that keeps you questioning everything until the end.

Girl meets boy through a dating app only to find he lives with someone who believes himself a dog.

The bizarre premise is what brought me to this movie. It does a good job keeping you entertained and curious. The nature of the plot is unsettling enough to give this movie a chance. The dog costume, though simple, is disturbing, to say the least, as are many of the situations seen throughout the movie. However, I feel the end result is a wasted opportunity. The premise was a perfect recipe to make a disturbing movie. Good Boys has its moments, but in the end, it fails to deliver. The ending was not good.

This is a lean, taut suspense film--only 80 minutes long, and more than half of that is truly suspenseful and unnerving. There are only four actors in the movie, and they all do an excellent job of seeming like real people with real motivations, blind spots, and flaws. For the most part, writer/director Viljar Bøe does an excellent job of showing us things that don't quite make sense and convincing us that it's not necessarily irrational or unreasonable. He creates a feeling akin to being seduced into a toxic relationship, where in hindsight you realize how abundant all the red flags were but in the moment you're willing to rationalize and excuse every individual one. If this is allegorical horror, then its allegory is for the poor "NTA" victims on the Reddit thread "Am I The A**H***?", who post detailed narratives of having been gaslit by psychopaths yet seem totally clueless about the blame not being their own.

That said, once the mystery is revealed about midway through the movie, the movie does lose a great deal of its suspense as characters quickly devolve into horror movie stereotypes. While the second half is disappointing, it's not so bad that it brings the whole film down--plus, the final moments are fresh and surprising enough that they'll guarantee the film's haunting images will stick with you for a few days. On top of that, Bøe's writing wisely leaves a lot of backstory unsaid, leaving audiences with plenty of queasy questions that they won't want to think about the answers to. A lesser film would feel the need to tidy things up more.

I'd recommend this for anyone who's into disturbing thrillers. The strong acting, masterful editing, and original premise are enough to earn a solid recommendation, even if the final act doesn't fully live up to the movie's promised potential. I eagerly anticipate Bøe's next film.

I tend to not do spoilers, so I won't spoil. Within 5 minutes, I was absolutely captivated. It's rare to watch a movie that I picked at random and say to myself "WTF?.... Oh, yes!".

Now, that may suggest there is something wrong with me, I'm not sure - but all I can say is that Good Boy is a rare find. It's truly original, not necessarily in a good way, but original.

This is not only a sick film, twisted in so many ways, but the acting, direction, plot twists, and well - the whole thing is something to be enjoyed. Excellent production quality and the scenery is quite lovely from an American's view.

All I can say is that I think you will come away loving your dog even more - although I'm not sure that has anything to do with anything.

Um... what did I just watch? No, seriously-what did I just watch? I had a feeling this was going to be a weird ride just from reading the summary-a man keeping another man as a pet dog while trying to start a relationship-but somehow, it was even more bizarre than I expected.

This is a tough one to rate because, on the one hand, the acting was great, and the film itself was really well made. But on the other hand... the story was just so unsettling. I feel genuinely uncomfortable after watching it, and that's only happened to me once before-with Tusk. And now that I think about it, aside from the body mutilation in Tusk, the core concept is kind of similar-forcing someone to become an animal to satisfy some twisted fetish.

That said, I'll give this movie a six because, despite how disturbing it was, it was definitely unique and not something I'll be forgetting anytime soon. Oh, and one last thing-Ingrid was an absolute idiot. That is all.