Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | July 28, 2025
The Chinese calendar might say that 2025 is the Year of the Snake but Hollywood is begging to differ—this year we’re going straight to the dogs! (Ain’t that the truth? Oh wait—we’re not talking politics.) Hot on the paws of Superman’s best fur-friend Krypto scampering away with that whole superhero flick came the news of the resuscitation of the Air Bud franchise, but even that’s not the woofingest contender of them all.
Cuz now there’s Good Boy, writer-director Ben Leonberg’s hyped-up haunted house movie that just played at Fantasia and which stars, as in starring as the lead character of the film, his own dog Indy. Told entirely from Indy’s perspective, meeting snout-first all of the complications and challenges that such a gambit produces cinematically, Good Boy is in concept alone unmissable. And while the ultimate results are a little more mixed than I’d like it does mostly end up being more than just an experiment, barking up a solid dose of jumps and jangled nerves plus a surprising amount of heart-tugging to boot. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise—movies about man’s best friend always seem to pluck at our emotions, and Good Boy tears right at ‘em.
The story is fairly simple, which was probably a wise choice given the fact that our lead character cannot speak. No, there’s no CG’d mouth a la the pig in the Babe movies here—Leonberg straps us, sometimes literally, to the side of a curious pooch as he scampers around, sniffing at things he (and in turn we) should not be sniffing at. Unfortunately nobody told Indy what curiosity did to the cat—Indy’s owner Todd (Shane Jensen) has uprooted himself and his pup to unfamiliar surroundings and a doggo’s gonna do what a doggo’s gonna do. Namely smell his way through every damn thing, no matter how stank it looks.
Todd, we learn early on, has been dealing with some kind of brain-related illness. We witness the effects of it first hand through Indy’s eyes in the film’s deeply unsettling opening scene as Indy comes upon his owner sitting still in front of a staticky television; it quickly becomes clear that Todd is in a catatonic state and bleeding somewhat copiously out of his nose. The thing is, Indy senses… something else there with them in that moment. A dark something else. Kind of a pulsating shadow in the corner of the dark room. And what Indy senses, we see—Good Boy isn’t content to just tag along Indy’s side. Approximating a canine’s extra-sensory abilities, the film tries to give us a look through a murky window into another world, one where some kind of a malevolent specter seems to’ve attached itself to Todd. Our good boy can see it. But can he do anything to stop it? That’s the question.
After getting out of the hospital for that health scare, Todd finds himself suddenly drawn to his family’s long-abandoned ancestral home out deep in the middle of the woods. (Where else?) A place where, according to several phone conversations that Indy overhears with Todd’s alarmed sister, nothing good has ever happened. (And that’s before a neighbor starts warning Todd about all of the fox traps littlering the grounds.) Last occupied by their grandfather (as seen on old videotapes throughout the film played by genre stalwart Larry Fessenden no less), the house has a history of death attached to it. Including grandpa’s own. And it’s been boarded up and gathering mildew and mice ever since.
None of that seems to matter to Todd, though, who packs up some stuff and drags himself and his dog out to the isolated place and begins sniffing about on his own. At what, exactly? That remains fuzzy to us because whatever’s driving Todd is a mystery since Todd is not our movie’s main character. That would be Indy, and we only pick up enough factul information as a dog can be bothered to overhear—and that’s not a lot, turns out, when there’s mice and mildew to be chased and rolled around in in perhaps not that order.
Which is a plenty good tool for disorienting your audience, and one that Leonberg exploits to its absolute reaches. Whenever the humans talking to one another might give up too much solid info the film just has Indy trot off on his own little adventure through the cavernous hallways of Casa Grandpa. Problem solved! Indy’s curiosity does have a direction, though—he seems especially interested in getting down to the house’s basement, but that’s a place Todd seems inclined to keep locked up, given his visceral reaction to whatever horrific smell it is that’s emanating up from down there whenever he opens that door. But for a dog? That’s the spot.
There’s an infamous and legendary scene in Wes Craven’s 1984 sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that’s told to us via a dog’s flashback—a bit of storytelling ballsiness from that horror renegade that Good Boy was clearly inspired by. Leonberg is 100% dedicated to giving Indy that sort of human-adjacent consciousness—one, let’s be honest, we can’t really ever know an animal has for certain, no matter how much we want to project such characteristics upon them. The film, being as it is a fictional product, can mostly get away with it, using Indy’s sight as its window into the supernatural. But the performance from Indy the dog, as adorable as the titular good boy might be, does become something of a litmus test for the audience. You’ve got to fully give yourself over to the story’s prescribed meanings behind Indy’s reactions, and not let yourself get too caught up in thinking about how the filmmakers probably smeared something in bacon grease to get the dog to go that way every time his ears tilt and he scampers along.
It doesn’t always work. As expressive as Indy is, you’re sometimes thinking about the bacon grease. You’re sometimes thinking about just how much footage wound up on the cutting room floor to get just the right expression of terror from the pup as it stares into the void encroaching in around him and his beloved owner inside this house of horrors. And it’s not helped by the fact that, beholden to the metaphor that will swallow up the last act of the movie as we come to realize just what it is that’s haunting these shadows, Good Boy keeps kicking the ball for its scares down the road. It can’t give up its game too quickly, so there’s a lot of just… wandering.
Because it’s the increasingly fraught relationship between Todd and Indy, as the human gets sicker and his devoted doggy becomes more bewildered by his owner’s irrational behavior, where Good Boy’s best and truest heart lay—those moments of increasingly erratic interaction between man and pet are always the film’s scariest. Leaps and bounds above those shifting shadows; the staring into corners with long blank deliberation. Otherwise, it’s awfully easy to get lost and distracted in thoughts of how the filmmakers got the dog to do this or that as we follow Indy climbing through windows and being an action hero trying to rescue the day.
Which is to say that in the end Good Boy isn’t an entirely successful experiment, slamming more than once against the invisible fence that separates human beings from an incomprehensible creature, even as it’s trying its damndest to put us right there into its head. Still, as Todd and the film and the dog himself drags Indy into danger after danger, the movie does elicit plenty of emotional responses, and at its best it disorients us inside of that same unknowable space. Trapped in a liminal mind, one that sees no problem sticking its snout straight into a half-rotted skeleton? That’ll sniff up a visceral reaction every doggone time.
