Stream it:
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With: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden
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Written by: Alex Cannon, Ben Leonberg
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Directed by: Ben Leonberg
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror, bloody images and strong language
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Running Time: 73
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Date: 10/03/2025
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Fraught Dog
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Due to its very nature, Ben Leonberg's experimental horror movie Good Boy sometimes obscures its narrative thread, but it's so inventive and so moving that it's very much worth a look, especially for dog lovers.
Retriever Indy (played by himself) lives happily with his person, Todd (Shane Jensen). Lately Todd has been having some trouble. He has been coughing a lot, and one time there was a lot of blood. Todd's sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) looked after Indy while Todd was in the hospital, and now that Todd is out, things seem all right again.
Todd decides to move into a remote cabin inherited from his late grandfather (Larry Fessenden). At first Indy isn't sure what to make of the place. A nearby hunter has laid fox traps all over the nearby woods. And Indy keeps seeing sinister figures lurking around the house. Worse, Todd has started coughing again, and acting very strangely.
A directing debut by Leonberg, who used his own Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Indy, as the star, Good Boy is filmed entirely from the perspective of the pooch. We rarely see the faces of the human characters, and their dialogue — which might explain exactly what's going on — is often deliberately muffled or buried.
It can be a little frustrating when we lose the thread, but this approach also makes perfect sense. If we were a dog, we wouldn't fully understand the events either; we'd only have our senses. Indy is as good a dog actor as has ever been seen on the screen; rather than being cute and performing tricks or daring rescues, his job is to be concerned, and sometimes scared, and he achieves these emotions expertly. It's difficult not to be moved by his plight.
Legend has it that Good Boy took three years to shoot, and given that the running time is a slim 73 minutes, one can only imagine the various stumbling blocks that occurred. But the finished movie is fluid and professional, showing no such signs of struggle. (Leonberg was smart to cast Larry Fessenden — a veteran director of experimental horror features and shorts — as the grandpa; he might have been a good resource.)
Finally, dog lovers will be wondering, and the answer is likely a make-or-break proposition, so we will tell you: Indy makes it safely to the end.
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