Watch the house, Indy! This article contains severe spoilers for “Good Boy.”
Does the dog die? It’s both the name of an incredibly needful website and one of the most common fears among moviegoers. Rarely has the question been more appropriate than with Ben Leonberg’s creepy haunted house movie “Good Boy,” which stars a dog and spends its entire runtime weaponizing the possibility of the plucky pup dying an awful horror movie death.
Arguably the first truly scary horror movie of 2025, “Good Boy” introduces Indy the dog (as himself). Indy has problems that he’s ill-equipped to solve. His master Todd (Shane Jensen) is unwell and sometimes lashes out at him despite the fact that he’s obviously a Good Boy. Todd also keeps dragging him to creepy locations like an unfamiliar old house and a strange cemetery that Indy just knows are trouble. Oh, and he keeps hearing strange whining, the shadows seem to be alive, and his dreams are suddenly extremely weird. There’s also that.
Being a dog, Indy has no understanding of (let alone solution to) these problems. So he does what he can: He protects his master and explores the territory despite being acutely aware that something unfamiliar shares the house with them. He does his best to comfort his human even when Todd pushes him away. He doesn’t know horror tropes, only canine curiosity and devotion. So, whenever there’s a strange noise, an ominous pair of eyes, or a mysteriously opening door, he investigates. This means that for much of the movie, Indy is voluntarily jogging nose-first into horror scenarios that the audience has been conditioned to believe are unsurvivable. This allows “Good Boy” to place its titular character in deep peril time and time again, and keep the viewers on the edge of their seats.
The movie uses Indy’s unawareness of horror tropes to keep the supernatural threat vague
Along with using Indy as the protagonist, “Good Boy” makes him the viewpoint character. Apart from the occasional expository phone call, line, and black and white TV footage, the audience only learns of the house, Todd’s condition, and the supernatural threat what Indy does, which keeps it all extremely vague. Are Todd’s outlandish actions in the house caused by his pain and desperation, or is he stealthily possessed by the entity that leads him toward doom? Indy doesn’t have a way of knowing, so neither has the viewer.
At times, it seems that Indy only survives his encounters with the supernatural because the semi-corporeal entity haunting the house inexplicably chooses to withdraw. In other scenes, the house ghost seems wary around Indy, who’s often unafraid to head toward the abyss that stares back. Roughly halfway through, when the altercations become physical, it legitimately seems that the movie might have opted to kill its four-legged protagonist, only to reveal that the entity merely moved Indy to a different location.
A possible explanation for this dynamic comes in one of the film’s many black-and-white TV clips. It depicts dogs as fearless creatures that have guarded humanity against things that go bump in the night since the days of the cavemen. Perhaps some mystical property of this ancient guardian duty is interfering with the monster’s shenanigans, prompting it to dodge Indy and look for indirect ways to get to Todd. These roundabout methods culminate in the entity tricking Indy into committing the ultimate sin and biting his master, which creates a temporary rift between them and earns poor Indy a stint as a chained yard dog. A truly low blow, even for a murderous paranormal creature.
A dog does die in Good Boy — just not the dog you think
Of course, even the mid-movie implication that the entity might not hurt Indy turns out to be a false flag. The movie’s big twist is that it actually has two cute dogs … and the previous four-legged occupant of the house met an awful end that the ghost is also luring Indy toward.
The fate the house seeks to impose on Todd and Indy is foreshadowed by recordings and supernatural visions of Todd’s grandpa (horror luminary Larry Fessenden) and his golden retriever, Bandit (Max). The old man — along with, it turns out, most of Todd’s other relatives — died a strange and relatively early death, and Bandit is heavily implied to have gone through a similar ordeal as Indy. Only, this doggy couldn’t get out of the climactic terror basement the entity brought in lockdown. The “Good Boy” climax reveals Bandit’s semi-mummified remains, still trapped in the cellar after the house took his master.
Luckily, Indy is more fortunate. While Todd suffers much the same fate as his granddad, his sister (Arielle Friedman) arrives to search the house after failing to reach him and frees Indy from his basement predicament. Just before Indy very wisely chooses to exit the cellar at her behest, the entity attempts to lure him back with a whistle, confirming that it was gunning for Indy to share Bandit’s fate all along. “Good Boy” has been on /Film’s list of interesting upcoming 2025 horror movies for a good while, and while it’s not wholly perfect by any means, Indy the dog very much is — and it’s impressive how much mileage his real-life owner Leonberg manages to get out of our concern for his safety.
