The Friend: Movie Review

Cast: Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Carla Gugino
Director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel

Naomi Watts' turn in The Friend largely pivots on the fact she spends most of the movie interacting with a dog and in one superlative scene, the ghost of her recently committed suicide friend Walter, played with even more sadness by Bill Murray.

But rather than go down the usual twee animal movie route, The Friend intertwines a what next for this odd couple familiarity with a great deal of empathy and care for those suffering from grief.

Watts is Iris, a long-term New York apartment dweller and a writer, whose tutoring is stuttering and whose life is upended by the death of women-loving Walter (Murray, in far too briefly but hitting the poignant notes). Things are further upended for Iris when it's revealed that Walter's dying wish was to have his dog Apollo, a Great Dane, rehomed with her.

It's not in her life-plan and when the dog arrives, rescued from the shelter by an obvious piece of emotional blackmail, he's beyond hang-dog and flops on her bed, an immovable object.

Frustrated and threatened with eviction for abusing the no animals policy on her apartment, Iris faces down the barrel of an obvious choice...

To say the resolution of The Friend can be seen a mile off is, frankly, an insult. 

Yet what's fashioned from this predictable story is less about the conclusion and more about the journey to it.

There's some beautifully poignant writing in this earnest and honest screenplay. A sequence about what happens to animals after their owners go is heartbreakingly sad - and the aforementioned scene with a dead Walter is just utterly devastating, brimming as it does with both anger and loss.

There's never been a more open tale of grief told on such a small scale. The Friend may start off with a predictable Waiting For Doggo storyline as Apollo's impact on Iris takes its toll, but its subtlety and unflinching exploration of what it means to grieve makes it a compelling and gentle watch that uses everything in its cannon to get under your skin.