It’s a cardinal rule of filmmaking: Don’t kill the dog. Do anything you want to the human characters, but you’re beyond redemption if the pets are hurt.

So here we are with Good Boy, made and marketed as a horror film told entirely from the dog’s point of view. The film comes to us from director/co-writer/producer Ben Leonberg, who shot the film in his own house and with his own dog, name of Indy. Production happened in three-hour chunks every day over the course of three years.

I hasten to add that there’s no animation, there’s no CG to make the dog more expressive, and the dog doesn’t talk. We don’t even get voice-over. The entire film hinges on the performance of this live-action dog. And the director — in a post-credits BTS segment that ran after my screening — emphatically and repeatedly insisted that Indy had no idea he was ever on a film shoot.

With all of that said, it’s frankly a miracle that Indy’s performance is so remarkably convincing. Of course he certainly gets some help from the editing, camerawork, lighting, music, VFX, and other such tricks of the trade. It takes serious filmmaking craft to make an animal so effective as an audience surrogate, especially without any professional training or voice-over. Moreover, the atmosphere throughout the film is so painstakingly crafted that even the cheapest jump scare is still great fun.

I might add that it was a great move to open with a montage of clips from when Indy was a cute little puppy. It establishes that Indy (yes, the dog is playing a character of the same name) and his human (Todd, played by Shane Jensen) have been inseparable for pretty much Indy’s entire life.

As implied by the title, Indy (the dog and the actor) isn’t just a good boy — he’s the bestest, sweetest, handsomest, most friendly and loyal doggie anyone could ask for.

The story is your standard “cabin in the woods” setup. Todd has recently been hospitalized for unclear reasons, so he goes to recover at his late grandfather’s remote cabin. I hasten to add that Grandpa is only one of a great many relatives who met with strange and premature deaths in that house. Within walking distance, there’s literally an entire cemetery full of them.

The house may be haunted, but there are signs that weird inexplicable shit was happening around Todd even at the time he was hospitalized. Regardless of what’s going on or why, the bottom line is that something is seriously wrong. And nobody can tell when something is wrong quite like a dog.

You know that archetypal horror character who instinctively knows that everyone’s in danger? The character nobody believes or listens to and eventually gets proven right about everything? Turns out that dynamic makes a lot more sense and works so much more effectively when that character is a dog.

Even more interesting, we barely ever get to see Todd. In almost every shot — right up until the climax — his face is either covered, far away, or shot in silhouette. At a guess, I’m assuming this made it easier for the director to serve as a body double for the actor through most of the shoot. But more importantly, it brings an air of mystery as to exactly how far gone Todd is, what exactly is wrong with him, and whether Indy can still trust him.

Not that it stops Indy from implicitly trusting his human, of course.

Keeping the perspective so tightly limited to a non-human character who can’t talk does come with some notable drawbacks. The big one is that the plot and premise are aggressively simple. We never really learn what’s going on. There are precious few characters aside from Indy and Todd, and the few characters who do show up are mostly paper-thin plot devices.

As far as Indy is concerned, he and Todd are in trouble and they both need protection. That’s it. Our main character doesn’t care about anything beyond that, and neither does the movie. I might add that the film is only 70 minutes long — not even close to feature length — so of course we’re not getting much of anything in terms of plot or character development.

Good Boy is basically what happens when somebody tries to make a movie on Hard Mode. No human actors, no budget, only 70 minutes of screentime, and only the bare minimum in terms of plot, character development, and CGI. Even among the most accomplished of filmmakers currently working, I expect the vast majority would’ve failed this test.

Yet for all the film’s obvious limitations, the sheer filmmaking craft on display here is staggering. With camerawork, editing, music, lighting, and only a dash of CGI, the filmmakers were able to craft a genuinely engaging horror movie with solid atmospheres and scares. All while getting an A-list caliber of leading actor performance out of an untrained dog.

If this is what Ben Leonberg can make with nothing, I’m boiling with excitement to see what he can do with an actual budget and a proper cast. It’s tough for me to recommend paying full ticket price for such a short movie, but this gets a strong, strong recommendation for home video or streaming.