Good Boy movie explained: the director built the ending to read two opposite ways on purpose
Ben Leonberg's dog's-eye horror film ends on an image that half the audience reads as a haunting and half reads as something much more ordinary. The director says both are correct, and he built it that way.
A film shot entirely from a dog's point of view has one built-in advantage: the audience never gets a second opinion. Ben Leonberg spent three years working out how to weaponise that.
Good Boy follows Indy, a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, and his owner Todd (Shane Jensen), who has a chronic lung condition and moves them both into his late grandfather's isolated farmhouse in the countryside. Todd gets worse. Indy starts reacting to something in the house that Todd can't see. Everything the audience is given comes through the dog.
What happens in the last twenty minutes
Indy gets caught in a fox trap, escapes, and is chained up in the yard, where something starts dragging him by that chain towards the dog house. He breaks loose and makes it to Todd's bedroom, where Todd has died of his illness. What follows is the sequence people argue about: Todd's body is coated in a black substance and hauled by a chain deeper into the house and then down into a cave system below it. Indy tries to stop it and can't. He gets out of the basement with help from Todd's sister Vera (Arielle Friedman), and he lives.
Leonberg has been blunt about that last part. Killing the dog was never on the table — he has noted that among the most common responses to the trailer were threats to go John Wick on him if anything happened to Indy.
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Both readings are load-bearing
Here's the design, in the director's own words.
"You could read this movie as a paranormal thriller through a dog's lens, or as this dog senses death," Leonberg told The Playlist in 2025.
Reading one: the farmhouse is haunted, the grandfather's death left something behind, and the entity takes Todd the way it has taken others. Reading two: there is no entity. Todd is dying of a lung disease, his body and behaviour change in ways a dog can smell and hear long before a human would notice, and everything on screen is an animal assembling those signals into a shape. The chain, the black coating, the cave — all of it is a dog's translation of a man being taken away by something invisible, which is a fair description of terminal illness.
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Leonberg's stated model is The Shining, a film that likewise refuses to confirm whether the hotel is doing it or the man is.
The film never cuts to a human character who could settle the argument. That isn't a gap in the storytelling; it's the entire mechanism.
How they got the performance
The production is the other half of the story. Made for $70,000, shot across more than 400 days over three years in Harding Township, New Jersey, with a crew consisting largely of Leonberg, his wife and producer Kari Fischer, and the dog — who is Leonberg's own.
- No conventional direction — as Leonberg put it, you can't tell a dog to walk into a room and react to a sound that isn't there. So the team made real noises off camera and built the scene around whatever Indy actually did.
- "Findy" — a stuffed replica of Indy used for lighting setups and stunt positions.
- Leonberg on camera — Jensen plays Todd, but the director stood in for shots where Indy would only perform for his actual owner.
- Minimal CGI — and none of it used to fake anything Indy does.
What it did afterwards
Released on 3 October 2025, it took $8.7 million worldwide, holds 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and 73 on Metacritic, and Indy won Best Performance in a Horror or Thriller at the Astra Film Awards — the first dog nominated in a category built for people, and the first to win it.