REVIEW: Good Boy [2025]

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 72 minutes
Release Date: October 3rd, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Independent Film Company / Shudder
Director(s): Ben Leonberg
Writer(s): Alex Cannon and Ben Leonberg

Did it come back?

It starts at the end. Indy (the filmmaker’s Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever plays himself) is sitting on the couch with his owner (Shane Jensen’s Todd) as a cellphone vibrates. No one answers the call, the dog starts looking around the room, and the person on the other end (Arielle Friedman’s Vera) eventually arrives to find an unsettling scene manifested (or literally portrayed) as Todd sitting up so blood can drip from his face onto the phone’s screen. She begins to call 911 as Indy struggles to comprehend what’s occurring.

Director Ben Leonberg and co-writer Alex Cannon flashback a few years to follow this prologue with a montage of Todd and Indy’s life together. Good Boy quickly proves an apt title as the retriever grows alongside his owner and adopts the sort of loyalty that makes him ecstatic upon watching Todd exit the hospital after a seemingly long stint away. Our presumption of cancer is soon confirmed once the two later get in a car and drive to Todd’s late grandfather’s (Larry Fessenden) abandoned house in the woods. Vera thinks the worst.

This is where the film’s horror ambitions begin since this locale isn’t your usual inheritance. It’s where Todd and Vera’s grandfather died and is known to have never held down a resident for very long (six generations of the siblings’ relatives were buried young in a nearby cemetery). Todd’s not worried, though. He just wants to endure the pain of his relapse alone. So, he ignores his sister ruminating about a dog’s ability to sense what humans cannot. He refuses to believe Indy will somehow know when things turn sour and warn him to seek help.

What Todd experiences is therefore different from what we see on-screen due to our perspective always being from Indy’s point of view. The film was born from a Stephen King inspired “what if?” question Leonberg posed to himself while watching Poltergeist in 2012: “What if the family dog was the only one who knew the house was haunted?” What if all those weird times every dog owner has witnessed where their pet barks at nothing or stares at an empty corner were evidence of the supernatural?

We see and hear what Indy does. A dog whining from within a closed basement. Shadowy figures seen in the distance out a rain-streaked car window. The gooey black hand of death reaching through shadows. We are also made privy to his nightmares of running through the house or the woods only to be taken or trapped. The illness overpowering his owner is both scary in its destructive force (often turning Todd angry and disinterested in Indy’s company) as well as in how its psychological genre trappings give it human form.

This blurring of the line between reality and “dog sense” is a big part of Good Boy‘s success at creating many unforgettable images (the monster is effectively gruesome and never too far away to make an impromptu visit on-screen). Credit the excellent editing too as it allows for our anxiety to manifest without also freaking out the dog due to a consistent shift from what’s happening around Indy to the camera becoming his eyes. And since death and Todd are interchangeable, we never quite know which grabs hold to pull him closer.

While Leonberg does a wonderful job transforming Indy into a movie star, you still can’t avoid the lack of self-preservation. Yes, this is a huge piece of what the filmmaker is trying to do insofar as presenting a dog’s undying loyalty to his person, but there’s a definite emotional disconnect when the character we are supposed to worry about isn’t worried about himself. As such, the stakes become nonexistent. We know how it ends and thus aren’t really worried about Todd’s fate, so we just want to tell Indy it’ll all be okay.

It’s an impressive feat, nonetheless. Shot across approximately four hundred days over three years to acquire as much coverage as possible when coaxing Indy to react as expected and lock the perfect take for every single second of its seventy-minute runtime, you truly see the hard work and production design in each frame. Losing the potency of its lead reacting to the terror, however, renders the jump scares more visual tableaus to absorb than kinetic moments to ignite an involuntarily lurch.

That fact ultimately kept me at arm’s length since we’re a voyeur appreciating Indy’s journey rather than a target of its thrills. It feels less like a horror than an action-adventure. A Halloween Horror Nights attraction on rails instead of a visceral descent into the unknown. It must be considering the experiment’s desire to maintain verisimilitude. An internal monologue would only render the whole too silly to overcome, but we do need that interiority. We need a character who’s able to reconcile what they see with what it represents.

We’re meant to fill that role, but I just couldn’t find a way to do so. We can’t be scared because Indy isn’t scared. We can’t hope its evil will be vanquished because Indy isn’t trying to vanquish it (nor could he be considering what we are told it literally represents—despite contradictory allusions to it potentially having paranormal origins). It’s an enjoyable film with a flawed premise since the dog’s indifference to the supernatural prevents the house from being haunted. This is a dog trying to avoid Death’s obstacles to give his owner one final hug.