The first image says it all: a russet-brown pooch drowsing on a couch, the warmth of his fur glowing bright against encroaching shadows.
It’s peaceful, almost banal. Then a phone rings, a jarring note in a chiaroscuro frame. Light flickers. Shadows thicken. The room distorts subtly, uneasily. Something terrible is about to happen, and the dog knows it first.
Director Ben Leonberg’s debut feature, Good Boy, takes that mood and stretches it into a slow-burn ghost story told entirely from a dog’s-eye view. The film stars Leonberg’s own dog Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever whose natural expressiveness anchors the story. It’s an ambitious idea: a haunted-house movie where the dog is the protagonist, not the victim or sidekick.
Indy’s owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), has been sick for some time with respiratory problems. After rounds of hospital treatment, he retreats with his faithful companion to his late grandfather’s remote cabin in the woods. His sister Vera(Arielle Friedman) worries from afar, but we mostly stay with Todd and Indy, cut off from the world as strange things begin to happen. As Todd’s health fades, Indy becomes his quiet guardian, alert to every creak and flicker.
What makes Good Boy intriguing is its dog’s-eye ontology. The perspective is original and often effective: it puts us in a place of instinct rather than intellect. Indy’s performance — captured over an astonishing 400 days1 — carries the film; conveying worry, curiosity, and devotion with every tilt of his head. He really does seem to understand that something terrible is coming.
Visually, Leonberg leans into oversaturated, hyperreal color; perhaps suggesting how a color-blind dog might register the world differently. His decision to keep the humans partly obscured — faces glimpsed only in reflection or silhouette — makes Indy’s world feel at once intimate and alien.
In form, the film sits somewhere between Skinamarink — its deep shadows and blue illumination a clear reference point — and Lassie or Balto, with touches of Courage the Cowardly Dog’s surreal domestic dread.
Unfortunately, the human story is underdeveloped. Todd’s sickness offers a metaphor (illness as haunting) but it’s treated in shorthand. We never get a clear sense of what’s happening to him, or why the supernatural elements matter. The film’s ambiguity might have worked beautifully as a 50-minute short, but at feature length it feels static and padded.
Scenes of Todd coughing or Indy prowling in silence repeat until the tension drains away, as what began as eerie minimalism becomes simple paucity. The final moments — poignant and melancholy — do restore some feeling, but they don’t erase the sense of a film that’s been hanging around too long.
Good Boy is a smart idea executed with genuine care: atmospheric but inert. Still, anyone who’s ever looked into their pet’s eyes and wondered what they see when they stare at nothing will find something to appreciate here.
