In the recent wave of minimalist horror — the creeping, patient, anti-spectacle cinema of Skinamarink, In a Violent Nature, The Outwaters, and When Evil Lurks’ quietest passages — fear is less a constructed set piece than a condition. A suffocating stillness. A negative space. A question of what the camera refuses to illuminate. Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy arrives squarely within this movement, committed to the genre’s most ascetic instincts: sparse storytelling, spatial ambiguity, and the eerie potency of silence. What distinguishes Good Boy from its contemporaries, however, is its protagonist — not a faceless killer or traumatised everyman but a 35-pound retriever named Indy, whose performance is so unwavering, so soulful, that he becomes the film’s emotional core and, crucially, its most expressive actor.

Indy’s work here has already made waves. The New York Times’ Erik Piepenburg called his eyes “soft” yet capable of conveying “joy, pathos and, most astonishingly, terror.” Variety’s Peter Debruge praised the film’s ability to “devastate us with the devotion these soulmates are capable of showing.” These aren’t backhanded compliments; they are acknowledgments that Good Boy, for all its supernatural trappings, rests on a profoundly grounded emotional premise — the purity of a dog’s love for its human, and what happens when that human begins to slip into darkness.

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The Haunted House as Negative Space

Leonberg’s directing style, shaped by an Eagle Scout pragmatism and an MFA’s sense of craft, embraces an artisanal minimalism. The film’s rural home — long vacant, thick with dust and memory — is not populated by jump scares but by suggestion. Corners breathe. Empty rooms hum with expectancy. The world is haunted not by apparitions but by absence.

This aesthetic places the entire burden of emotional interpretation on Indy, and astonishingly, it works. The dog’s reactions — a lowered head, a whine, a sudden lurch into the dark — become semiotic clues, as if the canine is whispering an alternate plot beneath the human one. In one early scene, Indy freezes at a doorway and refuses to enter, and the hesitation is more chilling than any spectral figure would have been.

Leonberg knows the grammar of minimalist horror: long takes, fixed shots, diegetic silence punctured only by the house’s nocturnal contractions. It’s a mode designed to induce paranoia in the viewer, to make us scrutinise every shadow for signs of the supernatural. The technique is effective — to a point.

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The Strength and Strain of Minimalism

Minimalist horror is a delicate architecture. When the premise is razor-thin, pacing becomes everything. Good Boy’s story — Indy senses an invisible presence; Todd succumbs to it — is conceptually strong but narratively sparse. It relies on atmosphere and gesture rather than escalation, and as a result, the film occasionally buckles under the weight of its own simplicity.

Scenes of Indy pacing hallways, staring into voids, or reacting to sounds we never hear create a hypnotic loop that risks repetition. What feels unnerving in the first act begins to sag by the midsection, and although the third act reintroduces urgency, the film’s momentum never fully matches the intensity promised by its premise.

This is not a failure of direction so much as a structural challenge inherent to the genre. When your protagonist cannot speak, when your antagonist remains invisible, and when your environment is deliberately barren, rhythm becomes treacherous terrain. Good Boy is atmospheric, often beautifully so, but the atmosphere sometimes dilates beyond its dramatic utility.

Still, the emotional spine — the bond between Todd and Indy — remains compelling throughout. Their relationship bears the film’s heart, even when the plot stalls.

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Indy, the Actor, and Indy, the Idea

To call Indy “remarkably focused” undersells the phenomenon onscreen. He is not a gimmick. He is not comic relief. He is not even, despite the title, simply “a good boy.” He is a full-fledged dramatic participant whose emotional arc mirrors Todd’s psychological unraveling.

We see the supernatural entirely through Indy’s sensory field, and in this choice lies the film’s most unusual power: the horror is not filtered through a traumatised human consciousness but through a loyal animal desperately trying to save someone who does not understand that he is in danger.

Leonberg’s gamble — to build a horror chassis around a dog — pays off because Indy is not performing as a trained animal. He is responding. Feeling. Reacting with an authenticity no human could replicate. If the film unsettles, it is because Indy believes the house is wrong.

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Where the Film Lands: Devotion as Haunting

For all its experiments in minimalism, Good Boy is ultimately not about ghosts or curses but about devotion. The supernatural presence may be indistinct, the pacing uneven, the tension sometimes stretched thin, but the thematic clarity never falters: a dog will follow you anywhere, even into the spaces where the living and the dead bleed together.

This is what elevates the film above mere gimmick or novelty. It does not anthropomorphise Indy; it recognises something purer — the instinctive loyalty, the unguarded love, the readiness to protect. In a genre built on human fragility, Good Boy dares to centre an animal’s emotional resilience.

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The Prognosis:

Good Boy is a compelling addition to the minimalist horror boom, a film that combines handcrafted genre sensibilities with an unusual and affecting performance from its canine star. While its slender premise occasionally stretches too thin, and its pacing wavers under the constraints of its aesthetic, the film remains memorable for the very thing that makes it risky: its sincerity.

A haunting, heartfelt experiment that sometimes falters but never loses sight of the bond at its core.

• Saul Muerte

Good Boy streams on Shudder from Nov 21