SIFF 2025: Good Boy // Chain Reactions

Good Boy
dir. Ben Leonberg

Wields a sharp understanding of the semiotics of horror to generate a potent atmospheric dread, effectively communicating its ideas through the soulful eyes of its canine protagonist. The novelty lies entirely in its shifted perspective offering, but it never wavers on delivering the expected thrills of a solid haunt. It's also smart enough to know where its strengths lie, the human performances are weak but are also intentionally sidelined, and easy enough to ignore in favor of the most gripping and believable performance you'll ever see from a dog. The premise is flimsy at best – even for the low bar baseline of establishing a coherent thematic thrust for a haunted house slowly consuming the psyche of its occupants, a lot of the threads here never really come together in a way that makes for a compelling narrative. It's a lot of familiar tropes that communicate the language of horror without the need to define how any of the disparate pieces fit together, a methodology that works mostly to its advantage despite a lack of connective tissue. In the moment, it's effective enough at instilling tension and dread that the missing pieces are easy to ignore, and there's rarely an easier buy-in for deep seated investment than your main character being a dog, capitalizing on our collective and almost instinctual desire for their unconditional companionship.

Chain Reactions
dir. Alexandre O. Philippe

As much about the ebb and flow of cinematic language as it is about Tobe Hooper's iconic horror masterpiece. Deftly edited to reflect not just its influence on the decades of cinema that have had to contend in a post Texas Chain Saw Massacre world, but to reflect the ways that Hooper's grisly vision responded to the decades of cinema that preceded it. Cinema as existential discussion rippling through time, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin informing the language of Leatherface's furious dance against the sunrise as much as Leatherface informed the violent, blood-drenched language of Ichi the Killer. A simple formula here is made energetically effective, five different frames of reference for the saw tearing through the fabric of culture. The segments vary in their degree of insightfulness, with Takashi Miike and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas being standouts for speaking on the film's lasting legacy, but clever presentation and sharp editing find ways to present cinema refracting through time even when the talking heads waver in their monologues. More than anything proves that art is so deeply and inherently human, built on experience and influence and recursive ideation, sun-baked violence and guttural screams constructed out of a cultural pressure cooker, an explosion of bloody Americana that would go on to influence cinema around the world. The saw is family, and it has brought us all together.

SIFF 2025 takes place from May 15-June 1, 2025. Find out more information about the fest here, and find continued coverage here on Step Printed.