As humanity’s “best friends,” dogs are the subject of particular empathy from us as moviegoers. Put another way: nobody better dare hurt the doggos or there will be trouble. Good Boy (United States, 2025) is a horror movie that practically builds its entire foundation on this premise.
Which, it must be said, is a double-edged sword: it’s a horror movie like few others. However, there’s a limit to the dramatic and formal possibilities for a character who perceives the world differently from human beings. And there are attempts by director and co-writer Ben Leonberg to solve this, though ultimately, the novelty of the approach wears thin quickly.
What’s It About?
The plot follows Indy, the dog of Todd (Shane Jensen), a man suffering from a chronic lung disease that requires constant care from his sister, Vera (Arielle Friedman). She only guesses what Indy perceives: that something supernatural is stalking her brother, just as it happened to their grandfather (Larry Fessenden).
One day, Todd impulsively decides to go to the rural house his grandfather left him, despite Vera claiming it’s haunted. With his health—and sanity—deteriorating rapidly in solitude, Indy will try to protect his human from the presence lurking in the shadows.
Good Boy gets stuck between drama and distilled emotion
Narrating a horror story from the perspective of a dog, incapable of dialogue, presents unusual and interesting opportunities. It allows—and requires—telling as much as possible with images to provoke emotion, almost in its most primitive and visceral sense. We’re looking at a production much closer to the non-narrative horror of Skinamarink (Canada, 2022) than one might think at first glance.
And Leonberg’s cinematography tries to evoke those emotions from and for his canine protagonist almost exclusively. Whether through the perspective of the framing, tricks of light, or lack thereof, we almost never see human faces in the movie. They’re in the film as voices on a phone or as darkened faces that provide a goal for the dog or deliver exposition to advance the plot. This has the side effect of placing the audience in an even more isolated and vulnerable viewpoint.
With few exceptions, Indy will be one of the few faces we see and, therefore, will be our emotional anchor in the film. And of course, being a noble and innocent dog, our sympathy for him is more than guaranteed, almost manipulatively so. Which, it must also be said, only helps to accentuate the moments of suspense and genuine terror even more—and in a more basic sense, Leonberg pulls off several excellent jumpscares.—
The problem is that, despite its brief runtime (just 73 minutes), the novelty of narrating through a canine protagonist not only wears off quickly, but makes Good Boy dramatically thin. It’s a movie that depends on the human character making the most idiotic decisions in the world, like staying in places where he’s clearly in danger. This makes Indy, paradoxically, react more like a smart child than a normal dog.
Stretching the logic this way doesn’t save the story from repetition either, falling into obviousness in its final third—though it must be acknowledged that it manages to surprise with its climax—.
It’s not, by any means, a bad movie. But even if its script leaves something to be desired, it deserves at least a couple of distinctions: it’s one of the most interesting dog-led movies in years and demonstrates that, in horror, there’s still a world of possibilities to experiment with.
