THE FRIEND (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Friend, Bleecker Street

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

There is some truth about grief in the corners and between the lines of The Friend. Considering how much co-writers/co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel attempt to do with this relatively simple story, they would have to touch upon something that's true, even if it were only by accident.

It is intentional here, at least, as the story, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel, follows Iris (Naomi Watts), whose best friend dies. That friend is Walter (Bill Murray), her former university professor, a long-time mentor, and recent employer. Walter was also Iris' lover for a brief moment in their history together, because Walter, also a writer, had quite a thing for women—younger ones and those he taught, especially—that eventually got him into some trouble some years before his death.

In theory, Walter and his legacy loom large in this story, because Iris finds herself in charge of editing a collection of his correspondences to be published soon, navigating the tricky relationships with and between the man's wives, and trying to help Walter's daughter, the result of one of his many affairs, who barely got to know and work with her father before he died. That's not even taking into account Iris' own grief, complicated by the death of her own father, which allowed her to have the rent-controlled apartment in New York City where she's still living, and the nature of Walter's death.

It was suicide. Iris cannot fathom why this man she admired and loved, who had such a zest for living, would die in that way.

There's a lot going on here, for both the story and its protagonist, and we haven't even raised the main point of focus in McGehee and Siegel's screenplay. That would be the matter of Walter's dog Apollo, a Great Dane that he found abandoned while on a jog one day. He adored the big canine, and the dog was, in turn, completely loyal to Walter—so much so that Apollo appears to be grieving his loss more than any human who knew Walter.

The dog, then, looms larger than anything else in this tale. That's on account of its sheer size, particularly when Apollo is framed within the cramped space of Iris' apartment, but it's also in the way that the dog's grief and fate become more important to Iris than anything and anyone else in this story. To be fair, the dog in the movie is quite the melancholy sight, with its wet eyes and its defeated attitude, as well as the way McGehee and Siegel seem to film the canine in slow-motion. Perhaps that's to make its movements more lethargic than they are, but it gives the dog an almost otherworldly quality, as if it is the embodiment of mourning haunting Iris' apartment.

If we look at Apollo in such a metaphorical way, this story might seem a bit more unified than its assorted parts suggest. It's difficult to take the animal that way, though, since so much of the plot is of a more practical nature and evasive about what Walter's death means to Iris until closer to the finale. The script juggles a lot—from Iris' work on the book and the avoidance of working on her own novel, to her interactions with Walter's ex-wives (played by Carla Gugino and Constance Wu) and daughter (played by Sarah Pidegon), to the biggest problem of all here. That's how building management doesn't allow animals in its apartments, leading Iris to have to figure out what to do with Apollo or risk losing her home.

There might be some truth in this messy amalgamation of ideas. It gives Iris a reason, after all, to keep the facts of Walter's death and how he died at a distance, because the last things she might want to do at the moment are to accept the loss, to figure out what she's supposed to do without Walter in her life, and to confront the thinking behind her friend's suicide. If that is part of the purpose of everything going on here, the filmmakers may have taken the notion too much to heart. Those concerns are at a distance, not only for Iris, but also within the story itself.

Instead, it's almost exclusively about the dog—how Walter's widow Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) hands over Apollo to Iris because she think her husband would have wanted that, how the building's superintendent (played by Felix Solis) keeps warning Iris that she can't keep the dog, how Iris tries to connect with the dog but can't quite get it to do much but lie on her bed with one of Walter's old shirts. Gradually, the two do connect, and that's when the story can finally address Iris' feelings about Walter's death.

It simply takes too long, however, for The Friend to reach that point, and when it does, the process is overly blunt, with a meeting with a therapist and a short story that Iris pens (This is one of only three scenes with Walter in it, which also might be part of the issue). The movie gets at some real pain and longing in those moments, but the rest of the movie is so distracted by assorted business that it only hints at them until then.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)