Opinion To love today is to grieve one day: On the dog’s eye view in ‘Good Boy’
Human children grow up to become adults who understand love as something mutual, fragile and contingent. They learn that loss itself is a condition of attachment. Do our “fur babies” understand it the same way?
This is the bargain we make when we welcome an animal into our hearts: An unquestioning love in exchange for the knowledge that we will, one day, have to learn to live without them Recent research in the UK has given scholarly form to what those who live with animals have always known: Losing a pet can be as devastating as losing a family member. The authors of the study, which was published in the academic journal PLOS One this month, recommend that the bereavement criteria for prolonged grief disorder (PGD) be expanded to include pets, too. To which people everywhere who have pets no doubt say: About time. For, while it is accepted that the pain caused by a human family member’s death can be crippling, sadness over losing an animal companion is often freighted with embarrassment. There is a sense that one must not linger too long in its shadow — as if grief has a hierarchy, and certain sorrows must always be kept in their place.
Even harder to articulate is the anticipatory grief that people with pets feel. Many of the animals we call our companions — dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbits — have life spans that are significantly shorter than ours. Every joyful moment in their undemanding companionship is accompanied by a low hum of dread, a sadness that waits for the right moment to land a punch. But this is the bargain we make when we welcome an animal into our hearts: An unquestioning love in exchange for the knowledge that we will, one day, have to learn to live without them.
I sometimes wonder at the poverty of human language in capturing the specific contours of this interspecies love, given how long it has existed. In English, at least, we increasingly reach for the terminology of parenthood to describe our position in relation to our “fur babies” or “fur children” — the fullness of love that it implies and the weight of responsibility that it carries. But this analogy has its limits. Human children grow up to become adults who understand love as something mutual, fragile and contingent. They learn that loss itself is a condition of attachment. Can animals — “not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward,” as the poet Mary Oliver wrote — understand it the same way?
Where language falters, there’s art. The 2025 independent horror film Good Boy, which began streaming in India recently, grapples with exactly this question. It takes what might have been a standard haunted house story and tells it entirely through a dog’s eyes. Indy is a good boy, patient, loving and loyal, who also immediately senses something is very wrong with the rural home that his human Todd — recently recovered from a serious lung disorder — moves them both into. There are strange flickerings in the shadows and a stench in the basement. Indy can hear sibilant sounds, like whispers, all around the house. As Todd’s hacking cough returns and his behaviour grows increasingly erratic, Indy’s unease hardens into vigilance.
As a horror film, Good Boy is deliberately restrained. The plot offers few surprises and the scares are minimal. What distinguishes it is the rigour of its chosen perspective. The camera remains low to the ground, with human faces often out of the frame or blurred. We inhabit the world as perceived by a dog, sharing his incomplete access to information and his heightened sensitivity to threat. The result is deeply unsettling — and moving. Indy doesn’t know what haunts the house, he only knows that it endangers Todd. And so, in his mute, resolute way, he goes through near-literal hell to protect the person he loves the most in the world.
If we take the monster in the film as a metaphor for the real-life dangers that might be lurking just out of sight — like the illness that afflicts Todd — Good Boy reveals itself as something more devastating than a horror film. It becomes a tragedy about how we can never really “talk” to these intimate companions, and assuage their anxieties when it matters the most. It is also a love letter. Because the good boys and girls of the world may not comprehend the things that imperil their loved ones, or the limits of their own abilities to intervene; they may not understand why we say goodbye, why one day we simply do not come back. But they know and feel loss, and with every beat of their little hearts, they grieve us when we are gone.
The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
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