Director/Screenplay/Photography – Viljar Bøe, Producers – Karl Oskar Åsli, Marie Wadde Grønning & Ane Marie Sletten, Photography – Viljar Bøe, Music – Martin Smog & Isak Wingsternes, Set Design – Marie Wadde Grønning. Production Company – NTNU/Fredagsfilm.
Gard Løkke (Christian Iversen), Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen (Sigrid), Nicolai Narvesen Lied (Frank), Amalie Willoch Njaastad (Aurora)
Christian and Sigrid connect on Tinder. They go on a date and he invites her back to spend the night at his place. However, she becomes weirded out when he introduces her to his dog Frank – a person wearing a dog costume that he treats as a dog in every way. When Sigrid returns home, her roommate Aurora points out that Christian is a multi-millionaire. Sigrid researches about furrie play and warms up to the idea. She returns for a second date and tries to treat Frank as the dog that Christian insists he is. However, when Christian suggests that the three of them go away for a weekend together, things turn strange.
Good Boy was the third film from Norwegian director/writer Viljar Bøe. Bøe first appeared with Til Freddy (2020) about a man who finds a series of letters that foretell the future, followed by the thriller Theodor (2022).
Good Boy should not be confused with Good Boy! (2003), a film from Jim Henson’s daughter about an alien puppy, which is a cute family film that exists at almost the opposite end of the spectrum to this. It all starts out innocuous. All you have to go on at the outset is a capsule description “Christian – a millionaire heir, meets Sigrid – a young student, on a dating app. They hit it off quickly, but there’s only one problem: Christian lives with Frank, a man who dresses up and constantly acts like a dog.”
Going by this description, it sounds that Good Boy could be a strange and eccentric romantic comedy about a girl hooking up with a man who has a roommate who is a furrie. In this regard, the two actors playing the couple, Gard Løkke and Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen, seem to be extremely well paired together – he radiates a handsomeness, while she has a wonderfully fresh-faced innocence to her – and you can believe in their connection.
The film finds its feet around the halfway point with a jolt twist where Frank comes up to Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen and pleads with her to save him, telling her that Gard Løkke is crazy. This suddenly propels Good Boy into an entirely different film altogether. It becomes in essence an Imprisonment Thriller where Katrine is trying to escape from Gard’s influence. It pushes everything into the realm of admirably twisted psychology – you are reminded of the one other film that featured a human puppy kept prisoner in the even more astonishingly perverse The Bad Man (2018).
Good Boy runs a surprisingly brief 76 minutes. I was a little disappointed with the denouement. [PLOT SPOILERS] We do get several scenes with Gard Løkke torturing Frank, battering the cage with a baseball bat, spanking him bare bum. On the other hand, when you compare this to some of the other films in the Imprisonment Thriller label, this comes out short. Viljar Bøe never pushes the sadism and torture element into the perverse territory it floats around doing. Moreover, you feel that another film in the imprisonment thriller genre would run a torturous rollercoaster and build up hopes of escape and seeing these dashed, whereas we get very little of that. There is however a nasty epilogue.
Trailer here