Good Boy (2025): Loyalty Has a Limit
In most horror films, the dog dies. But in Good Boy, the dog sees everything—and lives to tell the nightmare.
Directed by Ben Leonberg, Good Boy flips the creature feature formula on its head by telling the story through the eyes of Indy, a loyal retriever who follows his human, Todd, into a decaying ancestral farmhouse in the countryside. What begins as a quiet relocation soon unravels into something far darker, as Indy becomes the first to sense an evil force buried beneath the floorboards—and within Todd himself.
This is not a talking dog film. There are no jokes, no cute tricks. What unfolds is a slow-burning supernatural horror where trust, instinct, and animal intuition clash with human blindness. Indy watches. Indy understands. And when no one else can stop the darkness, he does.
The cinematography is stark and suffocating, blending natural light with growing shadows as the farmhouse transforms from home to haunted maze. The choice to tell the story largely without dialogue heightens the isolation. Every creak, breath, and growl is heavy with dread.
What makes Good Boy stand out is its emotional weight. Indy is not just a witness to horror—he is a victim of it. His loyalty is tested, broken, and rebuilt in blood. The fear in his eyes is real, and by the final act, it is clear: the scariest thing is not the monster, but what love turns us into when nothing else makes sense.
A disturbing, intimate, and wildly original film, Good Boy is horror told from the bottom up—on four legs, in the dark, with no one left to trust.
