GOOD BOY (2025) Review

I recently dog-sat for the uncle and aunt while they went to Tahiti for three-plus weeks.

It turns out, I'm not much of a dog person. I sure like dogs! Other people's dogs. As for having one? Well the need to walk them and take them outside is a bit much for me because I am lazy. And they bark. And they are generally big and clumsy, and they hit you with their paw when they want attention.

So while dog-sitting wasn't bad by any stretch, my wife and I will stick to our three cats. They love us just as much as a dog would, but they also poop in a box, and I don't have to pick it up out of the grass.

Today's movie review is for the recently-released horror feature Good Boy, and it reminds me that all pets are pretty awesome and deserve the best lives they can be given. Good Boy is the story of a dog named Indy and his owner, Todd. Todd is suffering from some unnamed medical condition, and after a particularly bad episode puts him in the hospital, he decides to leave his apartment life behind and go live in a cabin he inherited from his grandfather.

I know what you are thinking! A remote cabin in a movie? That's never good! And it's not. After Todd finds some old home videos his grandfather made, Indy and Todd start being stalked by a malevolent dark presence that it seems only Indy can detect.

As Todd's condition worsens--along with his mood--and Indy can't stop sensing the haunting darkness, will the two pull through together and escape their fate?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Good Boy is honestly the best kind of emotional manipulation. There is a reason why websites like Does The Dog Die? exist. People love pets! And we've all long since grown numb to watching human protagonists get hunted and haunted. So Good Boy gives us a protagonist who usually serves as a tertiary character (if that) in horror and is often just monster bait. But it's the base passion that most people--well, GOOD people anyway--have for pets and animals that carries this movie. I can't tell you how long it's been since I wanted to see a protagonist remain unscathed as much as I did during Good Boy. And I'm not even a dog person!

This movie is like a live action and horror-oriented version of Flow. The dog at the heart of the story isn't special; Indy doesn't talk or do anything unrealistic. He's just a pet dog, with all that entails! But that's the glory of the movie. It's an original idea, especially for this genre, that sells the movie in and of itself.

Being told through the dog's point of view means that the movie can do things like blur out Todd's features or keep us from ever getting a good look at him. It's not Todd's face that matters to Indy, after all; it's his voice, his scent, and his mannerisms. It's all very well thought-out.

+ Todd's illness makes for an interesting wrinkle in the story, as we are constantly waiting to see if the sickness will get him, or if the monster will get him, or if he will recover. We know there is a monster because Indy reacts to it, but we also know Todd is possibly dying regardless. This all ties into the previous Up, too, as it's tugging on our heart strings; we don't want Indy to be left alone!

But still, Todd's general lack of good health feels almost like a countdown in the movie. Can Indy save Todd from the shadowy monsters around the corner? Maybe! But can he save his human from what's killing him from the inside? No. It's up to Todd and science to treat that, and we're not sure they're going to be able to.

- I know lighting a movie isn't easy, but movies have been doing it for a hundred years. And most of those movies were lit better than Good Boy. There has to be a way to realistically convey "it's dark", but also let the viewer see what the heck is actually going on; I've seen flicks do it over and over again. Yet, this picture opts to make swaths of itself basically impossible to see.

I get what director Ben Leonberg was going for. If things are dark, things are scary! So if they are darker, then it must follow that they are scarier! But there comes a point where the viewer is struggling and moving their head and squinting their eyes, and the darkness is much more of a bother than a mood.

- The third act is a bit of a clustermess. I would probably have to watch it all again to clarify it to myself, but things happen relatively quickly, and the resolution isn't immensely satisfying, even if it's never really in doubt.

We get sequences of activity that take place in Indy's mind or dreams, and it eventually becomes hard to tell what is reality and what is not. Like the darkness, I imagine Leonberg assumed this would add to the atmosphere, but it left me a little frustrated instead, as I just felt like I wasn't sure if what I saw actually happened, or how it was appropriately resolved.

When we get to the finale, contradictions seem to abound, but I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't get into them. It ended up being a movie that made me start going "But then why...?" about various things that happened across the film. Like I said... it wasn't a satisfying ending for me.

Good Boy sure is a stressful ride if you are an animal lover. Leonberg and co-writer Alex Cannon sure crafted a tale that gets you emotionally invested from the jump. The various turns the film takes don't always work, but overall, this a good outing that does some impressively original things.

🍿 SCORE = 65 / 100