Good Boy
Director: Ben Leonberg
Writer: Alex Cannon, Ben Leonberg
Cast: Indy, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin
Part of: SLASH Filmfestival
Seen on: 19.9.2025

Plot:
Indy (Indy) and his human Todd (Shane Jensen) are moving to Todd’s grandfather’s (Larry Fessenden) old cabin. Ever since his grandfather died, the cabin has been empty with nobody interested in living in a place of many bad memories. In the shadows of the cabin, something dark is watching and waiting, something only Indy seems to see. He knows he has to protect Todd somehow.

Good Boy has the fantastic idea of shooting a horror movie from a dog’s perspective. While it is really good at capturing Indy’s point of view, other things in the execution of that idea unfortunately didn’t work so well. It’s not bad, but not as good as I had hoped.

Good Boy was one of my most anticipated films at the SLASH Filmfestival this year and I was lucky that it was both shown on a day I could attend and that I managed to get a ticket to the sold-out screening. Dogs are simply awesome (there was even a screening that you could attend with your dog the next day which is also an amazing idea). Anyway, I’m afraid that my expectations for the film were a little too high, unfortunately.

One problem I had was on a narrative level: at times, the film takes the fact that Indy’s dog understanding can’t understand everything as an excuse to not let the audience understand either what is going on. The further the story progresses, the more indecipherable it becomes. And there were moments – like Todd’s sleepwalking, or the cut from the fox trap to the doghouse – that just didn’t make sense to me.

The other, and to me bigger problem, was the obnoxious and very aggressive sound design. I don’t know if they were trying to amplify the audio to account for the dog’s superior hearing, but in the end it just meant that this film became one oft he very few movies that became so loud that I actually had to cover my ears during the grand showdown.

That being said, Indy was amazing and cute. The film has some excellent scares, and especially the middle part – often the weakest part of a film – was really tense and interesting. There are a few moments when the film is honestly funny, too. So, even though I wanted a little more of the film, it was far from bad.

Summarizing: given the dog bonus, absolutely worth seeing.