Movie Spotlight: The Good Friend

Someone you know posts about their bad boyfriend. Her friends pile in with “what a jerk.” Then one guy offers to track him down and handle it personally.

Marcus Sabom saw that exact scenario play out in his feed and couldn’t let it go. Not the post. The offer. “What if you actually did that?” he asked himself. “What if you actually tracked this person down and beat him up? What would that accomplish? What would the fallout be?” The Good Friend is where that question ends up, and it doesn’t end anywhere comfortable.

The killer lives in the extreme

Sabom traces the film’s DNA to something he sees as a real pattern online. Someone makes an offensive remark, logs off, logs back on a few hours later to find death threats and a pink slip. The original post may have been tasteless, the criticism maybe warranted, the professional consequences a matter of debate. But the leap to doxxing, harassment campaigns, mob-coordinated destruction? “That’s where I think perhaps people go too far,” he says. “And that’s where the killer lives.”

His antagonist isn’t born from a horror vacuum. He’s a logical extension of a real impulse, a man who reads pain on a screen and decides he already knows the truth of the situation. He acts on it. The horror is that his reasoning isn’t entirely alien.

A comforting title with something behind it

Sabom is deliberate about the name. The Good Son, The Good Wife, Goodfellas. Titles that present something familiar or wholesome and then hollow it out. “I chose the name because I wanted to invite a bit of a discussion on what it means to be a good friend,” he says. Sticking up for someone when they’re wronged sounds noble. Take it far enough and it becomes a different thing entirely.

An Id character, no explanation required

One of the sharper creative choices in the film is what Sabom leaves out. The killer’s end goal is never fully spelled out. His inner logic stays opaque. “He’s very much an Id character,” Sabom explains. “Someone who listens to their intrusive and violent reactionary thoughts.” No redemption arc, no detailed backstory to make it make sense. He sees, he decides, he acts.

Built for fallout

The film has a large cast by design. One murder doesn’t just affect the victim. There’s a boyfriend with his own life, his own people. There’s law enforcement. There’s a community that gets disrupted. Sabom committed early to showing the ripple, not just the stone hitting the water. “I made the decision early on to not just show people getting killed, but to also show the fallout from the murder.”

That size would drag a movie. In the book, it’s an asset. Characters get room to breathe that a film’s runtime can’t afford. A detail that enriches a person but doesn’t serve the plot survives on the page. On screen, it has to go.

Black Christmas in the rain

Two scenes gave the production its hardest moments. There’s a kill sequence built as a direct homage to the original Black Christmas, which reportedly drove Sabom’s editor to frustrated phone calls about how unmanageable the thing was. “I thought maybe I had gotten a little too ambitious,” he admits. It came together, and it’s one of the film’s best. The other was the opening kill, shot in the rain, which he calls “a marathon for everyone.”

Both came from a director who knows his horror history and worked with a DP who spoke the same language. “All I needed to do was tell my DP the inspiration and we went to work.”

What to know before you press play

The Good Friend was made on a shoestring budget with, as Sabom puts it, “a whole lot of heart and willpower.” It is a horror film, and it means to be one. But underneath the violence is a question worth sitting with: how much of your private life are you handing to strangers every time you post?

Thriller

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Streaming now on Relay.