Good Boy review – girl meets boy comedy-horror has rabidly bizarre premise – The Guardian
There’s a streak of boundary-pushing and wantonness to this Norwegian comedy-horror that bodes properly for the profession of director Viljar Bøe, even when this, his third characteristic, shouldn’t be executed with fairly sufficient finesse to match the rabid premise. It hangs on the quintessential fashionable relationship conundrum: what would you do in case you bagged your dream associate, solely to search out out that they reside with somebody who clothes and acts like their canine?
That’s the dilemma for scatty pupil Sigrid (Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredriksen), who, regardless of turning as much as their first date in her health club garments, appears to have struck on an implausible match of opposites in well-tailored, impeccably mannered, calorie-counting multimillionaire orphan Christian (Gard Løkke). She lounges in his bachelor mansion, will get crispy bacon on demand at breakfast – however nearly runs away howling when his “pet”, Frank (Nicolai Narvesen Lied), crawls in on all fours throughout dinner. The impression she has attached with a barking-mad Bruce Wayne is compounded by the eerie normality with which Christian treats this association.
Within the pursuits of affection, Sigrid decides to take the upper path, educating herself about “pet play” on the web. However there seems to be nothing sexual happening between Christian and Frank, who’s his childhood good friend and fellow loner. As Sigrid habituates herself to a menage à trois, Bøe milks this state of affairs for layers of pleasant discomfort. His movie isn’t a Nordic S&M comedy of manners like 2019’s Canines Don’t Put on Pants, nor a liberal probing of delusion like 2007’s Lars and the Actual Woman. It additionally thrives on a spikier paranoia: that each one this theatre is known as a type of gaslighting, simply with doggie treats, and Sigrid is being manipulated or groomed not directly.
Each leads are good, however the ultra-controlled Løkke – along with his poster-boy appears and too-timely smiles – is pivotal to stringing out the farce. Good Boy darkens in its second half, it goes in a slightly typical horror path and, sadly, it opts to not get actually bizarre and tail-chase its extra authentic impulses (like, as Sigrid asks, whether or not Frank will get to have intercourse). Nonetheless, there’s sufficient meat right here – concerning digital relationship etiquette and the underlying emotional viscera – for a Hollywood remake. Time for Matt Damon to wriggle into that furry outfit.
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