The Good Boy is a heart-warming tale about an oddball family reeling from a terrible loss that attempts to heal by taking in a wayward boy and working together to rehabilitate him. It’s also a heart-stopping thriller following a young man who wakes up from a wild night out chained up in the basement of a remote country estate inhabited by an incredibly messed-up bunch of people. In Jan Komasa’s new film, both stories are happening simultaneously, with disconcerting effect.
(As a side note, this is not the other 2025 horror film named Good Boy, which tells a ghost story from the perspective of a dog. Two chillers with the same name out in the same period isn’t a lot, but it is weird it happened twice. This one isn’t a tale of the supernatural, but there are ghosts of the past, sinister silver hand bells and warnings to never open the gate.)
