Gil Junger’s Think Like a Dog opens with a twelve-year-old boy hunched over circuit boards in his bedroom, treating a hobby project with the focused ambition of a graduate student. It is a promising start for a Premium VOD family comedy — and, for much of its running time, the film justifies that promise more consistently than the genre usually allows.

The premise is deceptively simple: Oliver Reed (Gabriel Bateman), a twelve-year-old tech prodigy, accidentally creates a telepathic link between himself and Henry, his beagle (voiced by Todd Stashwick). Henry’s inner voice turns out to be the most honest thing in Oliver’s life — equal parts dog philosophy and unexpectedly wise life counsel. Stashwick’s voice work is the film’s single most reliable pleasure: dry, warm, and calibrated precisely to the moment, whether Henry is musing about squirrels or offering advice that Oliver’s parents have failed to give him. Bateman, meanwhile, plays the role with the particular earnestness of a child who has decided to take everything seriously, and the combination gives the film’s lighter scenes genuine texture.

The film’s structural weaknesses arrive, as they tend to in this genre, in the adult tier. Josh Duhamel and Megan Fox play Oliver’s parents with genuine warmth, but the subplot assigned to them — a marriage under quiet strain — arrives on a timetable that suggests it was added to give the third act a conventional problem to solve. The resolution comes swiftly and without much complication, which leaves the main plot doing most of the film’s emotional work on its own. Kunal Nayyar’s comic-relief teacher, meanwhile, pitches each reaction a level above the scene requires, which works occasionally and feels strained the rest of the time.

Junger directs with functional economy. The telepathic connection is visualized through brief animated inserts that the film wisely keeps short — it trusts the concept without overexplaining it. The cinematography is clean and warm without attempting anything distinctive, which suits a film that knows it belongs in the Saturday-afternoon-viewing tier rather than the festival circuit. Within those limits, the technical craft is assured.

Think Like a Dog is the kind of film that delivers exactly what its title implies: a boy-and-his-dog story told from both sides of the bond, with enough wit and genuine affection to make it work as a family watch even when the screenplay reaches for the familiar. It will not surprise you. But Henry just might.