Film Review: Good Boy

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | Oct. 18, 2025

In the new psychological thriller Good Boy, an independent horror film with a highly innovative twist, you should expect a few classic jump scares, a demonic and unknown being, and a four-legged star who will melt the heart of any dog lover out there.

So emotive and so genuine is the performance of this dog (aptly named Indy both on-screen and in real life), that his debut won him the first-ever Howl of Fame Award at this year’s SXSW Film Festival in Austin where the project debuted. There was much appaws, and distributor IFC Films and their horror label Shudder came sniffing for the rights, anticipating big bark office returns.

They seem to be right, and Good Boy has become an underground, word-of-mouth discovery in a highly competitive slasher film marketplace, opening on 1,650 screens and looking like a hit.

What has everyone buzzing is how the film does it: by telling a timeless tale of supernatural evil almost entirely from the perspective of a dog who’s the only one who can see it. While sounding like a jerky-camera nightmare the likes of a Beggin’ Strips commercial, instead Good Boy is a sophisticated exploration that takes you not only inside the mind of this animal, but also makes you feel haunted the same way Indy feels.

As Indy becomes aware he’s seeing and sensing things that aren’t right, he becomes more and more protective of his owner Todd, a human we almost never see, represented in visual fragments and a voice mainly offscreen. The two clearly have a strong bond forged since puppyhood.

But this human has very human battles of their own happening, so Todd fails to take note of Indy’s warnings until it’s too late. And from there, all hell breaks loose for both of them.

Of course, this all takes place in Todd’s family cabin to heighten the mood, an off-the-grid and frozen in time style creepy place where no one will be able to help or save them. This iconic motif gives us the flickering lights and rusty door sounds we crave in our horror-movie escapism.

As reported first by the Traverse Ticker, the film’s talented composer Sam Boase-Miller not only delivers the perfect soundtrack for this wild ride, he lives and works right here as an audio teacher at Northwestern Michigan College. Boase-Miller is also a graduate of Interlochen Center for the Arts, and he attended the film’s local premiere at AMC Theatres.

But Indy is the undeniable star. And with a stone cold precision of horrified looks, emotion, and unbelievable blocking, this Nova Scotian Duck Tolling Retriever takes you into a fantasy world reminiscent of Benji and Lassie with no CGI or mechanical trickery.

It’s an astonishing feat of filmmaking, and one that took the director Ben Leonberg and his real life partner and cowriter Alex Cannon almost three years to make, shot by painstaking shot, with their own dog Indy, filming in their own home. Their creative moxie has resulted in a breath of fresh air for a genre. (And, if you stay for the credits, most screenings include a wonderful short, behind-the-scenes bonus doc showing you how they did it.)

Thanks to Good Boy, that weird stare your dog has at the corner, or that mysterious whine in the middle of the night at nothing at all, will never be the same.

Rated PG-13, Good Boy contains less than the average amount of blood and gore, instead relying more on pure imagination to scare the bejesus out of you.