Good Boy (2025)

Who’s a Scared Boy, Then? - Good Boy review by griggs

Dog-POV horror sounds like a gimmick until you’re watching a trembling retriever patrol a creaking house on your behalf. Good Boy takes the oldest haunted-house cliché – “the dog senses it first” – and runs with it, off the lead and into surprisingly sincere territory. Indy, playing himself, does more with a wary head tilt and a frozen stare at empty doorways than some human leads manage in an entire franchise.

Ben Leonberg keeps things stripped back: a sick owner, an inherited house in the middle of nowhere, and something in the walls that really shouldn’t be there. The best stretches are almost wordless – padding down dark corridors, pricked ears, following sounds we can’t quite place. If you’re at all soft on dogs, the tension has extra bite.

You can feel the budget straining, and the mythology is more hand-waved than house-trained, but at a lean runtime this is a neat little creature feature that mostly sits, stays, and earns its treats.