If there was an award for Best Clever Concept in a Motion Picture, I feel confident that Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025) would have been last year’s winner. It tells a rather familiar horror story of malevolent presences and rural haunting, but critically it tells it from the point of view of somebody’s pet dog. The idea is a terrific one, and that unprecedented perspective alone is sufficient reason to give the film a try.

In practice the film perhaps lacks enough meat on the bones to fully grab the audience’s attention. There is an argument to be made that it would function better as a short, and there is definitely merit to that. At the same time when the film so prominently features Indy, an absolutely adorable Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, quite frankly its 73-minute running time may not be enough.

In Good Dog, a man named Todd (Shane Jensen) moves from New York to his grandfather’s abandoned rural house, despite the growing concerns of his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman). There is a presence haunting the house, growing ever-closer to Todd, and the only person in the house that can see it is his dog.

A lot of the praise for Good Boy has been specifically for its canine star Indy, the film’s central character and sympathetic protagonist. It is, to be fair, a remarkable character created through patience, training, mise-en-scene, and editing. Dogs cannot, after all, act. It reportedly took Leonberg close to three years to get what he needed from his own pet for the finished film. It seems well worth the effort: Indy seems inquisitive, emotive, and thoroughly effective.

That all represents superb filmmaking craft, but the genius of Good Boy is less in its production and more in its screenplay. It is built with well-worn and familiar genre tropes: Todd is sick, and getting sicker, and the sicker he becomes the closer the spectral, death-like spirit becomes. At the same time the house is clearly haunted – either by spirits or memories – of Todd’s long-departed grandfather and his own pet dog. Presented in a conventional fashion, these elements would not deserve significant praise. Presented from the point of view of a pet dog, and they become immediately more evocative, menacing, and unfamiliar.

Indy is just a dog; he does not know what a haunting means, or what is supernatural and what is real. He sees a strange dog from time to time and is confused. He seems an angry old master and is afraid. He sees a spectral creature threatening his human friend and he rushes to defend him. Leonberg’s screenplay – co-written by Alex Cannon – works not because of its premise, but the treatment of that premise. Do things feel a little vague and unexplained? Of course they do. We’re just a dog.

This is Ben Leonberg’s feature debut, and it feels like a decently accomplished one. Its handle on horror tropes and conventions is solid, and it works around a powerfully expressed central theme of death and terminal illness. Its central perspective is a wonderful one. It is inventive and difficult, and against the odds he damn well pulls it off.