Following Steven Soderbergh’s Presence earlier in the year, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is the second 2025 film to hang its haunted house conceit on a perspective unusual to horror cinema. A genre that speaks beyond all others to the most self-centered corners of our id in the existential peril it calls to the fore of our minds, it’s an unusual — to the degree of near non-existence — gambit to decenter humans in the way of these two films. But Leonberg goes a step further than Soderbergh: where the latter relies on formal reconfiguration to manifest his disruption of the privileged human perspective, Leonberg favors not just the perspective of the titular good boy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Indy, but prioritizes establishing the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the creature. The result is a thrilling resistance to notions of human exceptionalism, introducing a movie rich in animal dignity into the filmic lineage of fauna-centric cinema.
As horror, Good Boy is quite a bit more boilerplate — though not without its genre-reverent charms. Indy (played by Leonberg’s own dog of the same name) is the companion to Todd (Shane Jensen), who we learn in a surprisingly affecting early montage is suffering from a chronic lung condition. Decamping with Indy to his grandfather’s long-abandoned cabin in the woods — which is rumored within the family to be haunted due to the strange decline and ultimate demise of his forebear on its premises — Todd is hoping a change of scenery will do his mental and physical health some good. This relocation is despite his sister Vera’s protests, as she seems more inclined to buy into the home’s dark lore, in addition to hoping to stay close to Todd should he suffer another medical emergency. Regardless, the plan seems to be working for a while, resulting in some doggo-human quality time away from the city’s bustle.
But Todd, heretofore shown to be a loving, gentle owner to Indy, soon begins to seemingly have a relapse of symptoms, which results in increasingly volatile behavior directed toward his doting pup. Complicating the diagnosis of Todd’s ills are the strange things Indy begins seeing and hearing around the house, as a malevolence begins blanketing the home in its ominous drear. From this point, Leonberg begins working through a checklist of classic horror iconography, parceling out shadows that obscure room corners, thuds and creaks from doors moving of their own accord, figures that seem to appear in lightning light, and various other insubstantial amorphous blobs that draw Indy’s increasingly constant attention. Todd, consumed as he is by sickness — of either physical or supernatural design — remains ambivalent of these happenings — until it’s too late.
At this point, it’s important to emphasize the degree to which Todd, integral as he is to Indy’s emotional experience, is airlifted out of the proceedings proper. Leonberg enlists sometimes obvious tactics to achieve this — human faces are always either cut off outside the frame or else shrouded in darkness, for instance — but this approach never functions as a mere formal gimmick. Combined with the low-angle shots used to assume Indy’s perspective, this visual design fosters a sense of the uncanny in its atypical compositions, which helps to elevate the familiar horror motifs deployed on the film’s shoestring budget ($750,000). Leonberg also importantly takes care not to simply drop his canine protagonist into a human role, but to understand the specificity of a dog’s experience of the eerie. Dogs are innately more interrogative of space than people, a fact the director leverages to eerie ends in Indy’s exploration of the house’s crannies. Likewise understood is the inherent sensorial aspect of the supernatural, and in having Indy explore this eldritch intrusion into his umwelt, there’s an authenticity to watching events unfold from this perspective: anyone who has ever wondered what their dog is staring at in an empty corner is sure to be a bit shook here. And this is all before we get to Good Boy’s pulsing climactic sequence, where human betrayal of man’s best friend proves to be more psychologically brutalizing than any descending darkness or shifting shadow.
It’s the impossible film that appeals to viewers on the strength of an undeniable gimmick yet manages to slough off any sense of contrivance by its final frame, and if Good Boy doesn’t quite manage this — Leonberg still folds in an unwarranted dose of metaphor(ror); the film is never exactly scary, even if spooky is readily achieved; and the lines, as written and delivered, can land a bit awkwardly — it comes closer than most could hope to achieve. And while many will dig on Leonberg’s film precisely for its gimmick — and that’s okay, too; it works! — the director’s true magic trick comes in casting off any tendency toward arrogant anthropomorphism in favor of a far more empathetic — and frankly, intelligent — approach to animal characterization. There is no doubt that Indy — in a truly remarkable, it must be said — is the most fully-formed character here (in fact, more fully-formed than most humans being spat out by the Hollywood machine), and that we are led through the experience of his interiority effectively, and so devoid of human condescension, is a small miracle. There is no final girl here; just a good boy.
DIRECTOR: Ben Leonberg; CAST: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films/Shudder; IN THEATERS: October 3; STREAMING: October 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 13 min.
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