Carla Gugino

Animal lovers….dog lovers, specifically…you’re gonna enjoy The Friend, a character study cleverly adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award-winning 2018 meditative novel about dealing with mortality. When celebrated writer Walter (Bill Murray) commits suicide, he leaves his beloved companion, a gigantic, black-and-white harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, to his best friend/onetime lover Iris (Naomi Watts), a stagnated creative writing professor. Problem is: Iris lives in a small, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment that has a strict ‘No Dogs’ rule.

The Friend, starring Naomi Watts and Bill Murray is an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel about an unconventional friendship between a writer and her late friend and mentor. The film follows Iris, a writer and professor living in New York City. She has just learned about the unexpected passing of her longtime mentor and dear friend, Walter. The heartbreaking news has shocked her, and she isn’t fully able to process how the death has affected her due to the pressures of finishing the novel she had been working on with Walter and having to take care of his Great Dane, Apollo, which Walter has inconveniently passed on to her. To make matters worse her apartment does not allow pets, and finding a new home for Apollo is proving that Iris is taking on more than she can chew.

The healing power of pets seems to be the running theme in Hollywood of late. From a penguin teacher to a Great Dane named Apollo, who silently and regally helps a grieving woman come to terms with the death of the dog’s owner and her close companion…in The Friend. The Friend is emotional support cinema. The screenplay can’t decide which way it wants to go so it just goes…and wraps us up along with it. No one is rescued from a well or saved from an epidemic, but hearts are mended and stolen. The film is melancholy without being melodramatic. Bring tissue. I did the “ugly cry” at the end, but that’s not a bad thing.

Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend, starring Naomi Watts as Iris and the 151 lb. Harlequin Great Dane Bing as Apollo, anchors serious commentary in animal stories, a strategy with just enough distraction that it allows coming sidelong at weighty issues. In fact, in The Friend, grief and suicide define the narrative. In it, Walter commits suicide (discussed but never shown) leaving Apollo to best friend, writer, and adult ex-student Iris. As a result, in a rent-controlled, 500-square-foot West Village Manhattan apartment, Iris Dixon faces multiple problems. Her building has a strict “no dogs” rule, and a very sad, clearly grieving Apollo doesn’t follow commands well.

Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s 2018 National Book Award winner. Set in a literary Greenwich Village that seems like a mirage from an earlier era, the world that Iris (Naomi Watts) inhabits feels lived in and wholly believable. She’s a blocked novelist teaching uninspired creative writing students and living in her late father’s rent-controlled apartment off Washington Square Park. And suddenly, with the suicide of her best friend and mentor, Walter (Bill Murray), she’s saddled with his Great Dane, Apollo. And her building doesn’t allow dogs.