Good Boy

Good Boy marks the feature directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, co-written with Alex Cannon. The story follows Todd (Shane Jensen), a young man suffering from a debilitating chronic lung illness, who abruptly departs New York alongside his devoted Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Indy. Todd decides to isolate himself in a remote woodland home inherited from his deceased grandfather, brushing off the distressed phone calls of his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman).

The retreat offers neither rest nor recovery. From the moment they arrive, Indy’s heightened canine senses detect an unnatural presence lurking in the corners, shadows, and surrounding woods. As Todd watches old family tapes on a CRT television and physically deteriorates, the unseen entity grows increasingly aggressive, while a spectral guardian—the grandfather’s deceased dog, Bandit—lingers at the periphery to signal impending doom.

Shot from canine eye level without dialogue voiceovers or supernatural animal gimmicks, the film tracks Indy's desperate efforts to understand and defend his companion against an ethereal menace that human eyes cannot comprehend.

The core thesis of Good Boy is an examination of loyalty, terminal decline, and the tragic limitation of love in the face of inevitable mortality. By centering the story entirely on a dog’s perspective, the film subverts traditional haunted house conventions to articulate how domestic pets experience the gradual illness and passing of their caregivers. The supernatural entity acts as an externalization of death and degenerative illness—an inescapable force that an animal companion can sense and fight against instinctively, but cannot stop.

The film supports multiple analytical readings:

Premiering at the SXSW Film Festival in March 2025, Good Boy was acquired by IFC Films and Shudder for theatrical and streaming distribution. Made for just $70,000, it became a breakout indie horror hit, grossing over $8.7 million at the box office. Alongside films like In a Violent Nature (2024), it contributed to the mid-2020s trend of minimalist, non-traditional point-of-view horror films that challenge conventional narrative perspectives.

Good Boy received strong critical acclaim, holding a 90–91% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 70/100 on Metacritic.

Critics widely lauded Indy's natural performance, the crisp 73-minute runtime, inventive camera positioning, and the surprisingly poignant emotional climax. Minor criticisms noted that the minimalist premise occasionally strained feature-length boundaries and relied on familiar haunted house tropes. Overall, it was celebrated as an imaginative and moving indie grief study.