The Friend | 2025
Naomi Watts and Bing in Bleecker Street's THE FRIEND. Courtesy of Bleecker Street.
There's a certain set of expectations that come with movies about dogs. They tend to be fairly saccharine affairs, if not particularly deep. W.C. Fields once said, "Never work with children or animals," and while he likely had a different idea in mind when he said that - both tend to be used as shortcuts and crutches by filmmakers because they are who audiences will likely sympathize with the most.
Giving credit where credit is due, The Friend, the new film by David Siegel and Scott McGehee (The Deep End), is not your average maudlin tearjerker. It's very much about a life-changing relationship with a dog, but Siegel and McGehee, adapting the novel of the same name by Sigrid Nunez, are at least attempting to do something interesting with the concept.
The dog in question is a massive Great Dane named Apollo, bequeathed to university professor Iris (Naomi Watts) after the death of her dear friend and former lover, Walter (Bill Murray). Walter's suicide left his friends and family reeling, his reasons for ending his life unknown. Now forced to contend with this oversized dog in her rent-controlled apartment, Iris faces the question of what to do with the animal in the long term. While she grapples with losing her best friend, Apollo is likewise grieving the loss of his owner. The "whys" of the situation make her question everything - and soon realizes that her frustration with the dog is in fact unresolved anger directed at her dead friend. A close friend feeling abandoned by someone she loved and a former stray once abandoned by his former owners now alone in the world, it turns out that she and Apollo are exactly what each other needs to process a profound loss and find the healing they each so desperately need.
The Friend has a tendency to meander a bit. The dog is charming, and Watts' fraught relationship with him makes for a pleasant viewing experience, but it isn't until the film starts its flashback structure and explores her relationship with Murray that the film really gets going, and even then, it constantly feels on wobbly ground. Late in the game, she seeks to have him licensed as an emotional support animal in a last-ditch attempt to prevent her from being evicted from her home for having an unauthorized pet in the building. At that point, Siegel and McGehee spend an unnecessarily long time explaining the themes of the movie in an extended therapy session that feels all too on the nose. Once it gets that out of its system, though, The Friend finally finds its footing in allowing Apollo to be an avatar for Walter, a chance for Iris to process her grief, let go, and say goodbye.
That elegiac nature goes beyond a mere story about a mismatched girl and her dog, and it touches on some interesting and often moving themes of grief and the sometimes bewildering aftermath of an unexpected loss. It also feels like it leaves much unexplored, and its uneven structure frequently hinders its emotional impact as it struggles to build a connection between its protagonist and her lost friend. Still, its final stretch finally allows the audience in, and it comes to a graceful conclusion in a powerfully honest exploration of the camaraderie of shared pain. Notably, Nunez also wrote the novel on which Pedro Almodovar's The Room Next Door was based. While I think both films have their shortcomings, they would make an interesting double feature in how they both confront the inevitability of death and its impact on those left behind. Siegel and McGehee are certainly not Almodovar, but they take The Friend to places films of its ilk rarely go, and it's all the better for it. Dog people - bring your tissues.
