The Friend (2024)

There’s something almost inevitable about Hollywood’s approach to grief. Take a complex human experience, sand down the rough edges, and package it into something digestible for mass consumption. The Friend starts with better intentions than most, but it still can’t quite resist the urge to make everything a little too tidy. Based on Sigrid Nunez’s powerful novel, the film follows Iris (Naomi Watts), a New York writer whose carefully ordered life gets turned upside down when her mentor Walter (Bill Murray) takes his own life, leaving her to care for his enormous Great Dane, Apollo.

I kept waiting for this premise to pay off in interesting ways. A reluctant woman, a massive grieving dog, the cramped reality of Manhattan living – surely there’s rich material here about how we process loss when life refuses to pause for our pain. What we get instead feels oddly inert, despite the best efforts of everyone involved. Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have crafted something that mistakes slow pacing for emotional weight, stretching what might have worked as a tight 90-minute character study across a wandering two hours.

The film suffers from what I can only describe as chronic indecision about when to end. Just when you think the story has reached its natural conclusion, another scene appears, then another, like afterthoughts that nobody had the heart to cut. It’s the narrative equivalent of a dinner party guest who doesn’t know when to leave.

Naomi Watts does her best with Iris, and she’s genuinely compelling to watch. Her scenes with Walter’s three ex-wives crackle with the kind of tension that comes from people trying to be civilised whilst processing complicated feelings. These moments feel real in ways that much of the rest of the film doesn’t. But then the voiceover kicks in, swinging between Nunez’s sharp observations and dialogue that sounds like it was lifted from a self-help book. When Iris explodes about the “fucking people” who get to stay alive while her friend is dead, the writing cuts to the bone. When it gets sentimental, I found myself wishing for subtitles that said what the characters really meant.

The surprise “actor” turns out to be Apollo, played by a Great Dane named Bing who somehow manages to convey more emotional depth than several of the human cast members. This dog’s comic timing is impeccable – watching him navigate a tiny apartment is genuinely funny – but it’s the quieter moments that really work. Those enormous brown eyes seem to understand exactly what kind of film he’s in. By contrast, Murray’s few scenes feel almost obligatory, as if he wandered onto set during a lunch break.

Here’s what puzzles me about this adaptation: from what I understand of Nunez’s acclaimed source material, she wrote a sharp, unsettling exploration of a woman grappling with her mentor’s suicide against the backdrop of shifting cultural attitudes toward male authority in academia. Walter wasn’t just any old professor; he was apparently a relic of a time when certain behaviours were overlooked, now finding himself labelled a “Dead White Male” in more ways than one. That sounds like provocative material, the kind that might actually justify a two-hour runtime. Instead, the film treats these themes like radioactive material, acknowledging them briefly before retreating to safer ground.

The suicide itself gets more thoughtful treatment, I’ll give the film that. Rather than falling back on easy moral judgments, it allows Iris to work through her complicated feelings about Walter’s choice. There’s genuine wrestling with questions about personal autonomy and the ripple effects of self-inflicted death. But even here, the approach feels cautious rather than courageous, as if the filmmakers were afraid to push too hard in any direction.

Visually, the film does better. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens makes New York look like both playground and prison, depending on what the story needs. The city becomes integral to the narrative in ways that feel earned rather than imposed. Only in Manhattan would someone seriously attempt to house a Great Dane in a studio apartment while juggling grief therapy and building management complaints. There’s something uniquely urban about this particular brand of chaos.

If you’re a pet owner, you’ll probably find plenty to relate to in Iris’s gradual transformation from reluctant caretaker to devoted companion. The film understands something true about how animals can ambush us with unexpected love. These relationships develop on their own timeline, outside our control, and sometimes they save us when we least expect it.

But I can’t shake the feeling that this adaptation pulls its punches in ways that likely diminish the source material. From critical discussion of Nunez’s novel, it appears she crafted something acidic and challenging, willing to examine uncomfortable truths about power, gender, and the literary world. The film version feels like someone took that reportedly sharp instrument and wrapped it in bubble wrap. All the potentially difficult edges seem to have been smoothed away in favour of something more palatable.

The supporting cast acquits itself well within the constraints they’re given. Ann Dowd brings her usual grounded authority to what could have been a thankless neighbour role, while the trio of ex-wives each manage to suggest whole complicated histories in limited screen time. Everyone seems to understand the world they’re inhabiting, even if the script doesn’t always give them enough to work with.

In my view, The Friend ends up trapped between competing impulses – the desire to honour its literary source and the need to work as accessible cinema. The result satisfies neither ambition completely. It’s too deliberate and literary-minded for audiences wanting straightforward emotional satisfaction, but too safe and conventional for those hoping for the kind of challenging adaptation that respects both its source and its viewers’ intelligence.

For viewers seeking a gentle, contemplative look at grief that won’t ask too much of them emotionally, The Friend serves its purpose adequately. Anyone hoping for something with the bite and complexity that the source novel apparently possessed might find themselves feeling a bit like Iris at the beginning – stuck with something they didn’t really ask for and aren’t quite sure they want.