Good Boy (2025)

By: Mike Ward on Saturday, October 04

PG-13 Running Time: 72 mins

SHOULD I SEE IT?

YES

  • Indy, the canine lead actor, is expressive, emotive, and delivers one of the greatest animal acting performances of all time.

  • The concept of Good Boy is an inventive and clever one - a horror movie told through the fears and anxieties of a loyal and trusting dog.

  • At 73 minutes, Good Boy never overstays its welcome and keeps you engaged, even when the story starts to feel thin and repetitive.

NO

  • The movie’s concept works against the overall impact of the film because Indy needs more story to work with. This is a screenplay issue though and not with Indy. Why? Because Indy is a good, good boy.

  • The movie really doesn’t do a whole lot. Indy’s human begins struggling. Indy has visions and perceives things. And that’s kind of all we get.

  • For horror fans, there is nothing ever scary or unsettling here and the movie becomes more a curious novelty than a compelling horror film.


OUR REVIEW

A bleak, supernatural suspense/thriller, Good Boy follows a single man (Shane Jensen) who relocates to a family home deep in the woods with his trusted companion, Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, who is, truly, a very good boy.

Co-written and directed by Indy’s real-life owner Ben Leonberg, the film is entirely told through the dog’s point-of-view. And believe me when I say, Indy is remarkable on screen. 

Leonberg’s concept is a novel one, but it becomes confined by its own limitations. Because we experience everything from Indy’s persepective, we rarely, if ever, see his owner’s face. We hear conversations, observe sounds and behaviors, allowing us to piece together the components of the story that Indy is trying to figure out. As intriguing as this sounds, the approach unfortunately mutes the effort to make Good Boy truly intense and scary.

Instead, it asks a lot of its lead performer and thankfully, Indy is up for the challenge. When I first saw the film with friends a few months back, we could not stop talking about Indy’s expressiveness. He has timing and instincts other actors’ would beg to have. With such a relatively thin screenplay, Leonberg has ultimately created a movie where we become more interested in how Indy responds, reacts, and performs to the mysteries around him than the story being told.

For dog lovers, this may be enough to carry them through the film’s brief 73-minute running time. For others, hoping to have some genuine chills and scares accompanying the storytelling, the film may feel quite underwhelming.

All of this becomes a curious spectacle, a suspense/horror hybrid where ghostly visions and uncertain realities crash together. Indy is perceptive, emotive, and utterly believable as he sees and senses things his human cannot. He steals your heart and you want to protect him at all costs. Thankfully, by the end, he’s still very much the good boy we knew he could be.

Mission accomplished, I suppose. But for everything Indy gives the viewer, he deserves a stronger story to match his memorable performance.

CAST & CREW

Starring: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin

Director: Ben Leonberg
Written by: Ben Leonberg, Alex Cannon
Release Date: October 3, 2025
Shudder/IFC Entertainment Group