Good Boy (2022)

Good Boy takes an absurd, almost darkly comic premise—a charming millionaire whose “roommate” lives as a human dog—and turns it into a sleek, nerve-tight thriller that keeps tightening the leash until you can’t look away. Director Viljar Bøe has a wicked gift for making discomfort feel purposeful: every polite smile and awkward pause becomes a pressure point, and the film’s psychological undercurrents about control and complicity linger long after the credits. The performances sell the escalating unease with conviction, grounding the strangeness in recognizably human wants—security, affection, denial—so the tension feels intimate rather than gimmicky. It’s not for the squeamish or anyone who hates cringe-driven dread, but if you like horror-thrillers that are genuinely original and quietly brutal in their implications, this one is a must-see.

Good Boy is clearly aiming for a slick, modern “dating-gone-wrong” thriller, using its absurd dog-roleplay setup to lure you in before it turns nasty. The problem is that the film leans so hard on the premise that if you don’t buy into the logic early, the tension can feel more like a stretched joke than genuine dread, and the ending may strike you as a forced shock move rather than an earned payoff. Still, the performances—especially the controlled, unsettling calm from the lead—do a lot of heavy lifting, and the movie has an efficiently creepy, minimalist vibe. If you like your horror grounded and psychologically plausible, this may irritate you; if you’re up for a mean-spirited, darkly comic concept piece that’s more “what did I just watch?” than deep, it might hit the spot.