GOOD BOY is a 2025 indie horror movie with a high-difficulty gimmick: the main character is a dog. Played by a dog. I’ve heard it said that it’s in the point-of-view of the dog, but that’s not the case literally (because the camera is usually on the dog’s face) or narratively (because I’ll be damned if I knew what the dog’s thoughts were on all this). But as human events play out nearby the camera is always paying more attention to this dog named Indy (played by director Ben Leonberg’s dog Indy), and that does feel fresh.

It really seems like Leonberg and co-writer Alex Cannon built the story around what they could get Indy to do, so in that sense it’s a star vehicle just like they used to make for martial artists. Of course, they filmed the dog for three years trying to get his performance right. Most kickboxing champions didn’t have that luxury.

It goes a long way that it’s well shot (cinematographers: Leonberg and Wade Grebnoel). It looks good and the conceit that the human faces are usually out of frame or out of focus (because a dog wouldn’t pay attention to a face? I don’t know) never feels contrived. The human actors are also up to the task, conveying characters well without the aid of those faces. They could easily feel unnatural or looped to death, but they really don’t.

The opening is striking: Indy wakes up on the couch to the sound of a phone vibrating, not noticing what we do: that his owner Todd (Shane Jensen) is sitting there motionless, like he’s dead. Then there are blood drops. For a minute I thought there was a killer loose, one apparently undetectable by dogs; after Todd had been verified alive and was released from the hospital I thought it was a drug overdose, because he decides to isolate himself on a rural family property that has been abandoned since his grandfather died there. It turns out I misunderstood, he has some kind of lung problem, which is why his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) is so worried about that weird choice. She’s the only person in his life and therefore the only supporting character besides a neighbor (Stuart Rudin, STAKE LAND). She’s mostly just on the phone, though, calling to check up on him.

There’s half-joking talk of a curse or haunting in this place, and they’d take it more seriously if they were paying attention to Indy like we are. He’s noticing sounds, shadows, silhouettes. Meanwhile Todd notes that the basement smells horrible, so we wonder what’s down there. Grandpa left behind a collection of self-taped videos, so we learn that he’s played by Larry Fessenden. As the movie goes on there are various hints about what happened to him, and it’s mentioned that nobody ever found his dog Bandit. Man, for a minute there I thought there was an evil feral dog and the heroic dog was gonna have to take the problem into his own paws. No such luck – it’s just ghosty business, with all the pros (some quick eerie images) and cons (whatever the logic of this is supposed to be I didn’t quite follow so it feels kinda random and meaningless) of ghosty business.

Which means this really has to rest on that one big strength at the center: being the most dedicated cinematic collection of shots where a dog seems to be staring at something we don’t see. It’s a creepy phenomenon that exists in life and also movies but never before this many times in one movie. I don’t want to be negative about the whole reason for the season, but I do think it gets repetitive quick, mostly because, I mean… he’s a dog. He’s the main character but he’s a very passive main character, even for a dog! He keeps getting creeped out by weird shit, but almost never gets concerned enough to growl or bark, so how worried should we be? He knows something we don’t, but that something does not seem to be that big of a deal, or he’d say so. We’ll be fine, I bet.

There’s actually a part where Vera asks if Indy has been acting weird at all – not because she thinks there’s ghosts, but because she’s heard of dogs sensing their owners’ health problems. This only underlines what I already noticed – Todd keeps having a dangerous episodes that Indy doesn’t seem to even notice. He’s not really that good of a boy, if you want to know the truth.

But there is an actual climax, and Indy does go into action, so there is some pay off. He even jumps out a window, which I suspect/hope was done with a dummy rather than a stunt. If so I’m still impressed by the Texas switch. That was cool.

A comparison that kept coming to my mind while watching this was IN A VIOLENT NATURE. Both tell a familiar type horror story but with the storytelling challenge of keeping the camera on a different character than usual. You still get mostly the same scenes you would otherwise but sometimes they’re going on just at the edge of or outside of the shot – a fun novelty.

Both were well received, but IN A VIOLENT NATURE was treated by many as a bold reinvention of the slasher. I didn’t see any claims like that for GOOD BOY. I think that’s because IN A VIOLENT NATURE chose a subgenre with a clear form and followed it very faithfully, just with unorthodox camera placement. GOOD BOY chose a format that’s less constructed, more of a string of weird incidents, usually without consequences. The dog even has weird dreams to wake up from. It’s not my favorite type of horror story, and though the dog hero is definitely an excellent twist, it also means we miss out on the human aspect of a ghost story. What would I do if I witnessed things that called into question my very understanding of reality? I don’t know. Does this dog understand how weird it is what he’s seeing? I have no idea. He’s a dog. A ghost may be a weird thing to see but how different is it from when he sees a fox in the woods or if a mailman showed up? I don’t know. But he behaves admirably at the end, I’ll give him that. I guess he’s an okay boy.