Good Boy (2025) Review - Sit. Stay. Feel.
Every now and then, a film comes along that reminds you why genre storytelling matters. Good Boy, the feature debut from director Ben Leonberg, is one of those films. It begins as a simple premise – a man and his dog alone in a cabin haunted by something sinister – and transforms into something unexpectedly tender and profound. What could have been a gimmick becomes, under Leonberg’s careful hand, a meditation on loyalty, loss, and the strange, unspoken empathy between humans and their pets.
It’s rare to see a horror film so rooted in love. Rarer still to see one in which that love feels utterly sincere, rather than sentimental.
The Setup
The film opens with Todd (Shane Jensen), a quiet, weary man retreating to a remote cabin once owned by his late grandfather (a brief but memorable Larry Fessenden, himself a legend of indie horror). His only companion is his dog, Indy – played by Leonberg’s own dog, also named Indy, in what can only be described as a revelation of a performance.
Todd isn’t running from ghosts. At least, not the kind we usually mean. He’s dying. That much the film makes clear early on. Jensen plays Todd with understated melancholy, a man who already seems halfway between the living and the dead, a fact that Indy seems to become increasingly aware of on some level.
As Todd and Indy settle into their isolated surroundings, something else begins to stir in the shadows: a presence, dark and wheezing, that seems to haunt the house itself. Only Indy can see it. And from that simple conceit – a haunting seen through a dog’s eyes – Leonberg builds an experience that is by turns frightening, heartbreaking, and quietly transcendent.
Through a Dog’s Eyes
Leonberg, who also handled the film’s cinematography, makes a bold stylistic choice: to film much of Good Boy from Indy’s perspective. This isn’t played for cuteness or novelty. There’s no anthropomorphic voiceover, no cheap tricks. Instead, the camera stays low, tracking through hallways and doorframes, lingering on human faces from a dog’s-eye angle. The effect is subtle but powerful: we feel small, watchful, hyper-aware of sounds and shadows.
It’s one of the most striking uses of perspective in recent horror. By grounding the supernatural in an animal’s sensory reality – sniffs, whines, trembling hesitation – Leonberg taps into a primal kind of fear: the helplessness of seeing danger that no one else believes in.
Horror cinema has a long history of featuring animals as part of the story, from Cujo to The Thing, but they are rarely treated as emotional centers of a story. In Good Boy, Indy isn’t just a pet – he’s the protagonist. He’s the heart, the witness, and ultimately the hero. And what’s remarkable is that none of this feels forced.
Indy the dog gives a performance of astonishing focus and subtlety. His eyes seem to register joy, fear, confusion, and, most hauntingly, recognition. Largely the result of careful editing as much as it’s the mysterious alchemy of animal emotion on film, the result is mesmerizing. You believe in him completely. He feels as real as any human character in recent memory.
Horror, Heartbreak, and Humanity
The best horror movies often smuggle deeper emotional truths beneath their scares. Good Boy isn’t interested in cheap jump scares or elaborate mythology. It’s a film about presence – the presence of death, of devotion, of something unseen pressing against the fragile membrane of ordinary life.
Leonberg’s direction is confident but patient. He lets moments breathe: Indy sniffing the air in silence; the sound of something moving upstairs when no one should be there. The scares come not from spectacle, but from empathy. We care about these two beings – man and dog – so deeply that every creak of the floorboards feels personal.
When the supernatural finally intrudes, it’s not in the form of gory violence or loud effects. It’s quieter, more mournful. The ghostly figure haunting the cabin seems less a villain than a manifestation of the inevitable – Todd’s approaching death – and the film makes us feel that, on some level, Indy is beginning to understand this.
This emotional clarity gives Good Boy a resonance that lingers long after the credits roll. What begins as a story about a haunting becomes a story about letting go. The film’s final scenes, which I won’t spoil here, achieve a poignancy that rivals the endings of Old Yeller or Hachi: A Dog’s Tale – works that also understood that the bond between human and animal can hold as much dramatic weight as any human relationship.
The Language of Trust
There’s an unspoken trust between director and audience in Good Boy. Leonberg asks us to believe not in ghosts, but in empathy – the idea that a creature who cannot speak our language might still share our fear, our love, our grief.
This is, in a sense, what cinema itself is built on: the ability to feel through images, not words. In that way, Indy is the perfect cinematic protagonist. His silence is expressive; his reactions invite projection. Watching him, we fill in the blanks. We imagine what he feels. And in doing so, we participate in the film’s emotional world.
A New Voice in Horror
For a debut feature, Good Boy shows an extraordinary command of tone. Leonberg’s direction recalls the quiet dread of Robert Eggers’ The Witch or Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. Yet he’s not imitating them. His style is gentler, more intimate, more humane.
There’s humor here, too – moments of domestic comfort between Todd and Indy that feel almost documentary-like in their warmth. The way Indy rests his head on Todd’s lap while they watch TV, or the way Todd mutters half-hearted reassurances to a dog who seems to understand far more than he should. These scenes anchor the film in reality, giving the horror that follows a devastating credibility.
And while Indy may be the film’s breakout star, Shane Jensen deserves recognition as well. His performance is deceptively simple: a man trying to be brave in the face of his own mortality, leaning on the only friend who never asks him to explain himself. Together, man and dog create one of the most moving screen partnerships in recent horror memory.
Final Thoughts
It would be easy to label Good Boy as a “dog horror movie” and leave it at that. But to do so would miss the point. The film isn’t about a haunted house so much as it’s about what haunts us: the knowledge that everything we love must one day leave us – or that we must leave it.
In that sense, Good Boy stands alongside films like A Ghost Story and The Sixth Sense, where the supernatural serves as a metaphor for human emotion. The scares are real, but the tears are, too.
And yes, bring tissues. Especially if you’ve ever loved a pet.
In a genre often obsessed with shock and spectacle, Good Boy dares to be small, quiet, and sincere. It’s a film about seeing, feeling, and ultimately saying goodbye. It’s about a dog who knows something his owner can’t face, and a filmmaker who understands that horror and heartbreak are sometimes the same thing.