Horror Heartbreaker Good Boy Is Much More than Its Doggy Gimmick

The mere idea to frame a supernatural horror film from the perspective of a dog is not itself some kind of revolutionary, automatically laudable concept. Such a gimmick could no doubt yield a fun or effective short film from any number of filmmakers, although tasking most people with turning it into a “feature length” project (still only 73 minutes, and that’s a good thing) would no doubt quickly reveal the cracks in the endeavor, the limitations of the animal in question, and the grind of working with the most unpredictable of star attractions. But what debut feature filmmaker Ben Leonberg has done with the release of Good Boy (starring his own dog, Indy) is not merely embracing some kind of clever trick of presentation, content to let the film’s novel gimmick speak for it. Good Boy is so much more than that–not just an impressive piece of animal wrangling and performance, but a genuinely heartwrenching piece of storytelling that also features impressive direction and immaculately staged visuals, framing and lighting in particular. Yes; it stars a dog–but it’s also one of the year’s most potently unnerving and emotionally resonant horror films at the same time.

Granted, I won’t fault anyone for being a touch confused about the title of Good Boy, considering that there’s somehow a second movie with this same title due out in 2025 from director Jan Komasa, another feature with the same title from 2023, and a third South Korean TV series with the same title this year as well. That’s a hell of a confluence for two common words. But when you hear someone talking about the “dog horror movie,” they’ll probably be talking about Leonberg’s Good Boy, and it will difficult for any other Good Boy to top this particularly nail-biting experience.

We start where we must: Indy is a dog–a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to be exact–and he is as good a boy as the title would dare you to believe. Indy belongs to Todd (Shane Jensen), a man who has been in and out of the hospital with some kind of soberingly serious disease–it certainly feels like it’s meant to be lung cancer, though the film stops short of feeding us too many specific details, other than what Indy may overhear. All we need to know is that Todd loves Indy, and Indy is deeply committed to his master, even when Todd decides to unexpectedly pack them up and move into his grandfather’s run-down home in the woods, where the old man (B-horror mainstay Larry Fessenden) previously spent his final days seemingly wasting away from the same condition with a suspiciously similar dog of his own. Is Todd simply fatalistic, masochistically embracing a family legacy of short life spans and lonely demises? Or are there darker supernatural forces at play, drawing him inexorably toward his destruction? If there’s any hope at all, it rests with the resilient Indy.

You will no doubt hear in any description of Good Boy that its story is presented from “the dog’s perspective,” but that description fails to evoke how much thought Leonberg has put into what those words really mean. Good Boy is not a horror film that just so happens to prominently feature a dog, like 1996’s goofy but underrated werewolf flick Bad Moon–it’s genuinely a story that is portrayed entirely through Indy’s eyes. The camera thus hangs down primarily at his height, trailing after him or impressively anticipating his movements, putting us almost always at Indy’s eyeline. He thus exists in a world of human legs and dangling hands, like some grim twist on the perspective of Peanuts or Muppet Babies, a ward of these unknowable, walking human beings who shout commands, order you about and occasionally dispense affection. Nor is Indy always necessarily interested in the moment in the details that the human viewer might be–when we perhaps want him to put more effort into straining to overhear a phone conversation that Todd is having, his gaze and attention are instead drawn to other places, to the skittering sounds and dark premonitions that only he can perceive. Indy is his own character, with his own perspective on this place: Limited, yes, but simultaneously more perceptive than Todd in so many other ways. He even has dream sequences!

What likewise sets Good Boy apart from what so many other filmmakers would no doubt produce from this premise is that Leonberg’s film is genuinely gorgeous to look at, eerie and evocative and heavily stylized regardless of anything to do with Indy specifically. He manages to shoot his star in a frequently otherworldly way, illuminated in beams of light that don’t always have a clear source, making Indy so often feel like an island of virtue in an ocean of darkness and evil. There’s a sense of heightened reality to nearly every shot–even when master and hound venture outside, it’s into the fog-wreathed woods, the bare leaves crunching as they tread over the gravestones of Todd’s unlucky forebears, as unearthly fox screams echo in the distance. The masterful use of lighting is likewise often used to obscure Todd’s face from our (or Indy’s) direct view, making him at times appear like a disembodied torso, beckoning his companion toward doom. You can feel the dog’s entirely justified reticence oozing from the screen.