At The Movies: Dog steals the show in Good Boy, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle is pure hokum

Good Boy (PG13)

75 minutes, opens on Oct 30
★★★★☆

The story: Notwithstanding their language barrier, a dog endeavours to protect his human owner from a malign supernatural presence in their home.

And the Academy Award for best actor goes to… Indy.

Never heard of him? That is because the American indie horror Good Boy is the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever’s screen debut, playing the canine companion of Todd (Shane Jensen).

The latter is in the throes of a chronic illness and retreats from New York City into seclusion at his late grandfather’s uninhabited, possibly cursed, woodlands cabin.

From the start, Indy discerns an apparition in the rooms’ shadows. He knits his brows into worried frowns, twitches his ears and anxiously sniffs the air.

He is alert and expressive. Not to mention very adorable.

His real-life owner Ben Leonberg is the movie’s American director, writer and cinematographer who, with his producer-partner and wife Kari Fischer, spent three years coaching Indy for the extraordinary performance.

Leonberg reframes the classic haunted house genre through a dog’s subjective experience in an ingenious experiment that sees only what Indy sees, with its camera fixed at the dog’s eye level, and feels what Indy senses – which is a foreboding confluence of a dark force and Todd’s deteriorating condition coming to take Todd away.

There is no plot exposition since animals do not operate on logic. All Indy knows is that he loves Todd and must do everything he can to save his chum, whose behaviour is turning erratic, even violent.

This tribute to the bond between man and his loyal best friend is narratively slight but devastatingly emotional in Indy’s mounting distress and panicked helplessness as he races towards a tragic finale.

Hot take: Clever doggie, disturbing movie.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (R21)

105 minutes, available on Disney+
★★☆☆☆

The story: Los Angeles attorney Caitlin Morales (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) hires nanny Polly (Maika Monroe) for her two kids, only to discover the help intends harm.

Hollywood in the 1990s was an unhappy decade for young urban professionals, terrorised, as they were, by a psycho lodger (Single White Female, 1992), psycho co-worker (The Temp, 1993) and psycho cop (Unlawful Entry, 1992).

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1992) by director Curtis Hanson was the biggest hit in this yuppie-in-peril canon for exploiting every mother’s anxiety at entrusting her child to a stranger. Rebecca De Mornay was one chilling au pair, plotting deranged revenge for her husband’s death.

What could be Polly’s ulterior motive in the 21st-century edition of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle?

The mysterious 30-something professes childcare experience and is installed in the Morales’ sleek modernist home to mind their baby and 10-year-old daughter (Mileiah Vega). In no time, Polly is sabotaging Caitlin, while the husband (Raul Castillo) continues to dismiss Caitlin’s growing suspicion as postpartum psychosis.

Polly contaminates Caitlin’s meds and spikes their family dinners. Most shockingly, she exposes the children to sugar and microplastics.

This is how Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera (Huesera: The Bone Woman, 2022) has updated the domestic thriller, which also now has a mixed marriage, a repressed bisexual heroine in Caitlin, and Polly as a queer antagonist with an Asian lover (Yvette Lu).

The progressive tweaks are so contrived as to be laughable, despite the capable actresses Winstead and Monroe.

They add nothing to a story that lurches towards a final reveal about childhood trauma, a cliche of contemporary cinema, when old-fashioned suspense is all the movie needed.

Hot take: This babysitter-from-hell hokum is as scary as a lullaby.