SXSW 2025 Review: GOOD BOY, A Furry Ghost Hunter Leads This Haunted House Chiller
We have this aluminum shed in our backyard. It’s leftover from the previous tenants. It is filled with potting soil, various broken garden tools, and at least a decade’s worth of random detritus that we’ve just been too lazy to clean out. However, if you were to ask my dog, Gnaghi, what’s in there, he would definitely say there are ghosts. Any time we let him out in the backyard with even the slightest breeze blowing, he makes a beeline for one corner of that shed and barks his fool head off.
We sit back and roll our eyes, getting increasingly agitated as he avoids doing his doggie business in favor of stalking the evil thing that lives in the shed. We’ve always ignored it, annoyed by his big dumb ways, but what if he’s right? That’s Ben Leonberg’s SXSW unique haunted house movie, Good Boy in a nutshell, and it’s great.
Following a mysterious medical crisis, Todd (Shane Jensen) decides to uproot himself and his dog Indy from their city home to move out into an old family home in the woods. Abandoned for years, the new place is nothing but cobwebs and vinyl sheeting hanging from the walls. It’s unfit for living, but Todd really needs the change and this place is bought and paid for. He borrows a generator from the neighbor and he and Indy begin the process of setting up house. While Todd – who we never get a really good look at – goes about his hooman existence, we follow Indy as he explores the house, and what Indy finds is terrifying.
Good Boy is Indy’s story. The camera follows him as he investigates the dark corners that Todd ignores, discovers history that Todd can’t see, and does his doggie best to protect his owner from the spectre of death that seems to be everywhere in the house. Shot almost exclusively from Indy’s perspective, Good Boy feels almost like a first-person shooter, because of this we see things from angles we’ve never though to emulate before, and it is an absolute blast.
The human characters in the film are only the barest of sketches. We know Todd is sick, but we don’t know with what; we know that his sister is worried about him and doesn’t want him to stay at the old house; we know that the neighbor is also unenthused about Todd decision to set up camp there, but we never get a good look at any of them. This isn’t their story; its Indy’s and he’s got some snooping to do.
Because we only know what Indy knows, the story – such as it is – is more than a little foggy. Indy has visions, nightmares, memories that don’t seem to be his; he seems to have a sixth sense about the malevolent aura of the house, but we are left to figure a lot of it our on our own and some of the details are unclear. If you’re looking for a definitive answer about what’s going on at any point, you may be disappointed; but what you won’t be disappointed in is Indy’s stellar performance.
It’s rare that a film rests its entire success on an animal performance with almost no help from a human cast, but Good Boy lives and dies with Indy’s performance, and he is shockingly good. This is – no joke – one of the best acting performances I’ve seen at this year’s SXSW. Indy’s relationship with Todd is so natural that I had to triple check that the actor wasn’t his owner (spoiler, the actor isn’t the owner, but the director is). This is more than a few simple dog tricks, Good Boy is seventy-six minutes of a fully committed lead performance from a dog who is believable at every turn. Never does it feel like the dog is acting, and while I’m sure it wasn’t easy to get the actions to match Leonberg’s ideas for the film, the patience was worth it, because Good Boy is incredible to watch.
While not without its weak spots – this is not a film with a strong plot – Good Boy is nevertheless a fascinating and entertaining film that will have to the audience empathizing harder with a dog than they do with most human protagonists. With an innovative hook and Indy’s mind-blowing lead performance, Good Boy is one of the most unique experiences of the year, it is big fun in a cute, furry little package.
