JunkDror

On paper, The Friend (2024) is a slow, meditative exploration of grief, love, and legacy–the kind of film that wants to whisper its way into your soul… but there’s just something about it.

Based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel, the film centers on Iris (Naomi Watts), a lonely writer who inherits her late friend Walter’s (Bill Murray) Great Dane, Apollo. Deeply fixated on the weight of a life half-lived, Apollo looms large physically and symbolically over the death of his owner, in tandem with Iris, who loses a best friend. It is a slow and quiet unraveling of emotions that co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel make too warm to ignore, yet too cold to remember.

Throughout the film, Walter’s interesting reputation as an aging professor and serial womanizer, remains a foggy but dominant presence in those lives he touched. He’s spoken of with frustration, reverence, bitterness, and love—all at once, especially by Iris, who is encumbered with his enormous dog and the absence of a man she both loved and resented. He was “an asshole,” by many accounts, but also the closest friend Iris had and the dearest ex-lover she never tied down. That unresolved tension—quietly devastating and never neatly reconciled—might be the film’s most compelling thread.

Naomi Watts gives a soft and grounded performance, portraying Iris and all her sadness in a way that feels lived-in, not melodramatic; functional, but not hollowed out. Single, childless, and unmoored, Iris is a female lead we don’t often see treated with this much seriousness, even if the film doesn’t always know what to do with her beyond displaying her. Deeply tired and emotionally thrown, she is not falling apart or frantically looking to make peace with Walter. Instead, in her unglamorous and slightly numb determination, she focuses on her relationship with Apollo and its enamoring qualities. Whether she does so to honor the deceased’s wishes or out of sheer guilt from never loving them the way she wanted, remains a mystery. Regardless, it hints at the film’s best version of itself: messy, ambiguous, and honest.

Undeniably, the dynamic between Iris and Apollo becomes the emotional center of the story in a sentimental, yet arguably vague approach. Apollo isn’t just a metaphor for grief or Walter—though the film tries very hard to make him one—he’s also a real character, played with remarkable restraint and charisma by the dog itself. That stoic, soulful Great Dane ends up doing more heavy lifting than any monologue ever could. Still, there’s a strange authenticity in how their relationship develops from tense and awkward to something soft and deeply mutual, ultimately because it works best in its quietest moments. Not the ones with poetic voiceover, but the ones where nothing is said at all: Iris stepping over a sleeping Apollo, sitting with him in silence, and writing while he breathes next to her. These moments feel intimate and borderline intrusive; so true in a way the film’s narration never quite achieves.

But for all its moody silences and whispered voiceovers, the film does not deliver the emotional impact it seems convinced it’s offering. It arrives cloaked in soft lighting, clean aesthetics, and predictable slow pans that almost prioritize the curation of a melancholic feeling rather than engaging story. Even the narration, filled with philosophical musings, seems too controlled to say anything revolutionary. Lines like, “The more suicidal people there are, the less suicidal people there are,” can strike a second of chuckle, but leans on redundancy over substance and confuses vagueness for profundity. The whole film is built around this tension–between wanting to say something universal and not having anything all that new to say–often too enamored with its own quietness to risk real complexity. 

Still, while the film does not earn the depth it reaches for, it is not empty. Despite the pretensions, The Friend occasionally lands somewhere between honest and even moving in its search for meaning when it capitalizes off emotion than when it tries to intellectualize it. The film captures the loneliness of survival and the strange, unexpected forms that love can take after loss–confusion, guilt, indifference, and even relief. It is seen in the love between Iris and Walter, however complicated and incomplete, will forever linger. And even more so, in the companionship between Iris and Apollo, in which their coexistence never feels false.