GOOD BOY (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Good Boy, Independent Film Company

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 2, 2025

The premise of co-writer/director Ben Leonberg's Good Boy initially seems a clever riff on an old cliché of too many horror movies to mention. It's basically that the dog is always the first to notice that something is amiss—that there's a killer hanging around outside or, more pertinent to this story, that the house is haunted. The dog in this movie isn't just an early portent of impending doom, though. No, Indy, played by a dog with the same name, is the star here.

Both as a character and a performer, Indy is a very good boy, indeed. Many a pet owner has believed that their furry friend could be in a movie, so it's quite good fortune that, in real-life, Indy belongs to Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer. Surely, they have a keener eye and a more pragmatic way of considering such thoughts about the potential star-power of a beloved pet—even their own—than most folks. Whatever made them believe that Indy could headline and carry an entire feature-length movie was more than just nepotism, in other words, and the proof of it is on the screen.

Before this review simply becomes the equivalent of many admiring head-scratches, the movie itself, unfortunately, doesn't quite live up to the novelty of its premise or the charm of its main canine actor. It's such a good idea, in fact, that one wants the material to work, but instead, it becomes quickly repetitive, doesn't quite stick to the gimmick in a way that makes it entirely unique, and is ultimately about such a different concept than the one originally presented that the whole thing feels like a cheap kind of cheating.

It's a shame, really, that the state of modern horror shows such a habit of relying on some underlying metaphor that even this movie, surely the first to attempt this narrative trick, ends up doing the same thing. The logic of Leonberg and Alex Cannon's screenplay does hold up a bit better in that regard, since the movie's perspective is so distinct and so inherently mysterious, but even so, the horror trappings here still feel put upon a story that's anything but what that approach suggests.

To be fair, the filmmakers are more or less upfront with the real conceit of this tale, as Indy sits in an apartment with his owner Todd (Shane Jensen). All of the human faces here, by the way, are obscured in some way, which makes sense, considering the point of view belongs to a dog (They don't see or, at least, focus on faces the way humans do) but also keeps the human side of the story at a bit of a distance. Once we realize that Todd is ill and the entire story revolves around that idea, it's easy to see why that distancing effect undermines a core component of the narrative here.

After a brief stay with his owner's sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), Indy's life seems to go back to normal after Todd is released from the hospital. Instead, the man decides to move to a remote cabin in the woods, where multiple generations of his family lived until the death of Todd's grandfather (played by Larry Fessenden), who left the house and everything in it to his grandson. Vera isn't happy with the idea, both because she worries her brother might be hiding something about his health and on account of rumors that the cabin is haunted.

It certainly seems as if the latter is true. Indy starts seeing and hearing things on the property even before the pooch steps inside the cabin. A dark figure appears in the rain behind the car through the rear window. Strange sounds, as relatively normal as assorted creaking and as ominous as what seems to be a dog barking through an air vent in the floor, begin to fill the air. All of this stuff plays exactly like any ordinary horror movie, as something appears in frame and disappears as soon as a reverse shot of someone looking that direction breaks up the scene. The novelty, of course, is that the "someone" not noticing the enigmatic shape in time is a dog.

That pretty much makes the movie little more than a routine horror story combined with the genuinely clever novelty act of observing a dog perform the way a human actor might within the same situation. Indy starts investigating those noises, as well as some smells that Todd says reek of death, and, when the pup becomes scared that someone—or something—might be in the house with him, stares into shadowy spaces or scurries to some hiding spot. The low angles of these shots, since the camera sticks to Indy, does add a subconscious layer of threat to these scenes, since whoever or whatever is around seems to tower over the dog and, by extension, our perception of these scenarios.

Indy, a retriever of the more specific toller breed, is an incredibly photogenic and, when the pooch whines and anxiously barks, sympathetic dog with a promising acting career ahead. Good Boy might be a horror movie that's only noteworthy for its central gimmick, but it shows its lead actor to be a real star.

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