Good Boy (2025)
The dog knows something is wrong. Explaining it is another matter.
Directed by Ben Leonberg · Written by Ben Leonberg and Alex Cannon · 73 minutes · US: PG-13
Starring: Indy · Shane Jensen · Arielle Friedman · Larry Fessenden
Music: Sam Boase-Miller
A dog stares into an empty corner. The person living with him sees an empty corner. Anybody who has shared a house with a dog knows how quickly that disagreement can make a perfectly ordinary room feel like a problem.
Good Boy builds a haunted-house movie around it. Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, follows his owner into an isolated family home and starts noticing things the human explanation cannot accommodate. He can look, listen, bark and stay close. He cannot sit Todd down and explain why the basement requires immediate professional attention.
Ben Leonberg gives that limitation real dramatic force. The film's strongest idea is the helplessness of loving somebody whose decisions you cannot change. The haunting itself is less distinctive, and a succession of ominous looks can start doing the work of one ominous look. Still, this is an unusually committed way of making a familiar ghost story feel vulnerable again.
Before you watch
- Animal peril: a dog is threatened, trapped and visibly distressed, including in a snare sequence. His eventual fate is discussed only below the spoiler boundary.
- Illness and bloody images: serious respiratory illness, coughing blood and physical decline are depicted. A sleepwalking episode includes repeated head-striking against a hard surface; the scene does not establish suicidal intent.
- Sustained supernatural horror: frightening figures, disturbing bodily imagery, jump scares and isolation. The small scale does not make it a gentle animal adventure.
- Bereavement: family loss and attachment are central. Specific human and animal outcomes have separate protected details.
The BBFC guidance corroborates the strong horror, bloody images and head-striking. There is also strong language. The emotional pressure comes from watching a companion sense danger without being able to make the household understand it.
Release and runtime: this is Ben Leonberg's 2025 film, released theatrically in the US on 3 October 2025. AFI Silver lists 73 minutes and PG-13; the BBFC cinema timing is 73m25s. Some accounts round it to 72 minutes. Those listings do not, by themselves, establish different story cuts.
Specific content details (contains spoilers)
- Todd has a depicted supernatural departure and his body is subsequently discovered by Vera; the precise biological moment and cause of death are not settled.
- Indy discovers Bandit’s skeleton in the cellar; the prior animal death has visible remains rather than merely an implied outcome.
A familiar house at an unfamiliar height
Todd retreats with Indy to a house inherited from his grandfather while struggling with illness. His sister Vera worries about him. The move promises quiet, but quiet is not especially reassuring when you are the household member paying attention to noises nobody else follows up.
The camera's low vantage point changes the familiar geography. A doorway becomes a substantial obstruction. An adult can be present as legs, a voice or a body moving out of reach. Human conversation continues, but it no longer has an automatic right to explain everything in the frame.
The film stays closely aligned with Indy rather than making every shot a literal view through his eyes. We need to see him looking as well as see what attracts his attention. That exchange gives a pause meaning: first the dog, then the empty space, then the dog again, now bearing an interpretation we have supplied ourselves.
It is a useful reversal of the standard horror arrangement. The animal who would normally bark a warning and disappear into the background becomes the person we keep checking on. The humans have become the unreliable source of reassurance.
Indy is the lead. The filmmaking makes the performance.
There are no wisecracking animal voices to translate the situation into a joke. Indy's attention has to carry the scene. A held stare can suggest suspicion; placed beside a different image, it can suggest recognition or concern.
That is an achievement of selection and construction as much as animal behavior. Treating Indy as a tiny human actor who understood every dramatic beat would miss the interesting part. The film builds a legible inner life from actions a dog can actually perform.
In SAGindie's interview with Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer, the filmmakers describe more than 400 filming days across three years, without claiming an exact count. They also explain that Leonberg and Fischer supplied the physical human performances around Indy, with Shane Jensen and Arielle Friedman providing the character voices. Larry Fessenden's grandfather appearance used him physically as well as vocally.
That unusual division of labor matters. The actors help make Todd and Vera sound like people with a relationship, rather than instructions coming from somewhere above the frame. Indy's familiarity with the bodies beside him supplies another kind of continuity. The finished illusion depends on both.
The labor does not automatically make the movie good. It does explain how the movie gets something more useful than a succession of cute reaction shots. Its animal behavior and human performances have been assembled around a sustained relationship.
The house has a sound before it has an explanation
Looking down a corridor can only tell Indy so much. Sound extends the house beyond the available image: an offscreen disturbance gives him a destination, and gives us a stretch of space to worry about before we reach it.
The production makes that apparent immediacy particularly deceptive. In the filmmakers' No Film School interview, they explain how constant on-set encouragement and commands meant human dialogue had to be recorded again. They describe filming clean plates to remove themselves, reversing action, adjusting speed and using a stuffed stand-in called Findy for dangerous effects.
The distressed dog on screen is therefore a constructed dramatic effect. These are the filmmakers' accounts of their methods, rather than an independent welfare inspection, but they give specific reasons to separate the staged peril from the circumstances of filming it.
Sam Boase-Miller's music helps turn waiting into apprehension. Just as important is the space left around the human voices. Todd may be close enough to hear and still unavailable in the way Indy needs. A haunted house is frightening; a haunted house in which the only person you trust keeps getting harder to reach is a better problem.
Loyalty is a powerful limitation
An adult in a horror film can decide to investigate, call somebody or make a terrible plan. Indy has a narrower range of action. Staying near Todd can be the reasonable response to affection and the worst response to danger at the same time.
That tension gives the film its emotional shape. It asks what protection means when you cannot remove the threat or persuade the vulnerable person to leave. The dog can remain attentive. Attention cannot promise a cure.
Todd's illness also prevents the house from functioning as a simple sorting mechanism between sensible animal and foolish owner. He is dealing with something physically frightening of his own. His diminished capacity makes the bond more difficult, rather than merely making him an adult who refuses to believe the obvious.
There is room to find that moving without accepting every supernatural flourish as equally persuasive. The ordinary dependency is already strong. When the film gives it a threatening shape in the dark, the shape sometimes adds force and sometimes competes with the more troubling thing it stands beside.
Where the premise has to keep earning its running time
The risk of this approach is repetition. Once we understand that Indy senses something and cannot explain it, another wary look down another passage needs to change the pressure. A new angle on unease is not always a new development.
The human story pays for the perspective, too. Todd and Vera cannot receive the same sustained access as Indy without weakening the organizing idea. Their relationship supplies stakes, but portions of it remain distant. That distance is a choice with a cost, not something the unusual premise automatically excuses.
The supernatural mystery is also more evocative than exact. The film does not offer a satisfyingly itemized rulebook. Leaving something unexplained can preserve fear; it can also leave the impression that another ominous image has arrived because the previous one has finished its shift.
Those limits keep the recommendation specific. The appeal is attachment, restricted perception and patient visual storytelling. Someone primarily looking for an elaborate mystery may find the underlying narrative slight. Someone frightened by being unable to help may find that very slightness leaves the important nerve exposed.
Corny DNA
A haunted-house film starring the director's dog sounds like an invitation to camp. The film's seriousness is the surprise. Its animal lead is the organizing perspective, and the emotional appeal is intended to hold without a wink.
The unusual production and the dog's expressive presence give it a distinct identity. They do not establish an enduring cult reputation or make it a so-bad-it-is-good attraction. The six numerical axes remain unscored.
Indy did receive a specifically documented acting honor: Best Performance in a Horror or Thriller at the 9 January 2026 Astra Film Awards, according to the organizer's winner list. That is more useful than an expansive claim about the first animal ever to win any “major” acting award.
Verdict
Worth watching — proposed. The perspective changes the emotional stakes of a well-worn haunted-house story, and the coordination of animal behavior, framing, editing and sound gives the premise substance. The thinner human characterization and repeated scare pattern are meaningful limitations.
Best suited to viewers who value atmosphere and attachment over elaborate supernatural explanations. Expect a short film with a sustained interest in helplessness, and take the animal-peril advisory seriously.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the earlier dog's fate, Todd's final sequence and Indy's ending
The house has already outlasted another companion
Indy discovers Bandit's skeleton in the cellar. The earlier dog's loss is given a physical image, rather than remaining a vague suggestion that something unfortunate happened. The detailed content account corroborates the visible remains.
That discovery changes the shape of the house. It contains the residue of a bond like the one organizing the present story. For Indy, continued loyalty may mean following a pattern whose earlier ending is already there to be found.
Todd's death is certain; its supernatural mechanics are less tidy
The closing sequence has Todd confronted with his own body and drawn by the entity through the house toward the subterranean tunnel. Vera subsequently discovers his corpse. Those events establish his death without cleanly dating the biological moment at which he dies or proving that the apparition, rather than his illness, is its sole cause. The released-film account supports that distinction.
Calling the whole thing an offscreen death erases the depicted supernatural departure. Calling it a straightforward on-screen killing would impose a certainty the staging does not supply. The sequence makes death perceptible while leaving the relationship between bodily collapse and haunting unsettled.
For the critical argument, the essential fact is simpler. Indy stays near somebody he cannot save. The movie has made proximity feel like the available form of care, then reaches its limit.
Indy survives, and the whistle remains
Indy hears Todd's whistle from the tunnel but goes upstairs to Vera. He survives and leaves with her. During the credits he rides in her car; the familiar whistle draws his attention back inside.
The movement upstairs supplies a concrete alternative to endless vigilance in the house. Another living person can care for him. Leaving does not require the film to pretend that the old attachment has disappeared.
The final whistle can suggest a continuing presence or the persistence of recognition and memory. The sound does not settle a complete supernatural explanation. The dog has a future beyond the place of loss, while the movie allows that loss to remain audible.
Sources
- AFI Silver: identity, principal credits, 73-minute runtime and US PG-13 listing.
- BBFC: exact presentation timings and detailed content guidance; contains spoilers.
- SIFF: festival credits, including Wade Grebnoel's cinematography and Sam Boase-Miller's music.
- SAGindie: Colin McCormack interviews Leonberg and Fischer about the production and performances.
- No Film School: direct filmmaker interview on animal performance, sound and staged danger.
- Hollywood Creative Alliance: official 9th Astra Film Awards winners.
- Kids-In-Mind: detailed content account; substantial spoilers.
- Film account: original US release date, additional credits and closing chronology; spoilers.
This is a source-based editorial draft. No fresh viewing is claimed.