Good Boy (2025)

Warning: spoilers are inevitable to get at the emotional core of this beyond the film’s central gimmick

Titular good dog Indy (Indy) is taken to a cabin in the woods by his owner Todd (Shane Jensen), following some very bad news about Todd’s health. The thing is, this is the cabin where Todd’s grandpa (Larry Fessenden in various home video diaries being extremely Fessenden, as he should be) died with his own dog from an illness that looks a lot like the consumption Todd apparently suffers from.

And something’s very wrong with the cabin, too. Some ghostly, and increasingly present thing is haunting the place, hovering around Todd to hurt and possess and make him disappear.

Indy, who sees if not understands the threat earlier than Todd does, is trying his best to protect the central person in his life, but there’s only so much even the best boy can do against the fact that loss is inevitable.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is a gimmick film, at least in so much as it is laser-focussed on its central gimmick – telling its tale of a haunting through the eyes of a dog. But then, being a gimmick movie doesn’t mean it has to be a lazy movie, so Leonberg really embraces his gimmick – and his canine star (and I mean star) – trying to do as much with it as possible to twist and shape genre standard scenes and scares until they fit into the dog’s eye view without making the film something as boring as a deconstruction of the genre.

At the film’s best, this makes it a clever, often exceedingly well staged example of how little twists and turns to the comfortable and cosy shapes of tropes and standards can make them feel fresh again; in its lesser moments – few as they are – it at the very least never shies away from its gimmick even if it were easier to do so.

Unlike other gimmick movies, this also happens to have a genuine emotional core, even beyond the obvious “look at this lovely doggo!” (I’m more of a cat person anyway, sorry, Snuff), and manages to draw an emotional yet not too sentimental portrait of love and the things dogs (or people) might be willing to do for it.

Though, in the end, this isn’t a film about holding on as it is one about letting go, with the haunting as a perhaps somewhat too obvious metaphor for illness, and the narrative very much one about how we have to accept loss.

Thankfully, Good Boy handles this well enough so this doesn’t become too much of a teachable moment sort of thing or some ill-advised take your medicine cinema. Here, as well, Leonberg hardly takes a wrong step while keeping to the core ideas of his film.