Movie Review: 'The Friend' is Not Very Friendly

The Friend

Directed by Scott McGehee, David Siegel

Written by Scott McGehee, David Siegel

Starring Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Carla Gugino, Sarah Pidgeon

Release Date April 4th, 2025

Published April 8th, 2025

How do you mess up a concept as simple as having Bill Murray and a Great Dane in a movie together? This should be the easiest movie in the world to make, you just put Bill and the dog together in a location and watch the comedy burst forth. Sadly, the boomer male fan-fic, The Friend can’t do something as simple as let a funny man and a cute dog be funny and cute. Instead, they need to make an utterly obnoxious movie in which Bill Murray’s character is a stand-in for every male boomer fantasy and all women spend all of their time talking about how great he was. Oh, and there is a dog, I guess.

The actual central character of The Friend is played by Naomi Watts. Watts is Iris, a writer who happens to be best friends with Bill Murray’s Walter, a writer of prodigious talent and legend. When Walter takes his own life, Iris is left to care for Walter’s dog, Apollo, a massive Great Dane that his wife does not want and that his adult daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) is not capable of caring for. Iris, a writer herself, has nothing but time on her hands, what with her severe writer’s block, so she takes on the dog problem despite not being allowed to have a dog in her rent controlled New York City apartment.

Even though Walter was apparently Iris’s best friend, former professor, mentor, and lover, she’s never seen or met his dog before. In fact, I am not sure that she or anyone else in this movie has interacted with a dog before. How every character in The Friend manages to be surprised by the sight of this dog, as if he were an alien and not just a large dog, baffled me throughout The Friend. It’s a large dog, they’ve existed your entire life. The cuts to the surprised faces of minor characters in The Friend could be the most boring and long supercut imaginable.

Iris has no idea how to be around a dog. Her go to for trying to bond with Apollo is to play records from her late father’s collection. He’s a dog, he doesn’t care about your music Iris. Apollo is sad because he misses his master, Walter and because he’s a dog, he doesn’t understand the concept of death. He does however, react anytime anyone talks about Walter or reads his words aloud. You might think that this could be the simple way for Iris to connect with Apollo. Why, she’s even writing a book about Walter and his correspondence. She could read his letters and bond with the dog. Problem solved.

But no, of course that doesn’t happen. Instead, we are left with unending scenes of a baffled Iris sleeping on an air mattress in her apartment while the sad dog takes over her bed. This goes on for so long and the solution is so maddeningly simple, based on the established logic of the movie, that Walter and Apollo have an almost supernatural chemistry, but the movie refuses to make use of this established story element, preferring to repeat over and over again how Iris is incapable of just petting the dog as a way of connecting to it. She’s planning to surrender the dog, which might explain her reluctance to bond with him, but that doesn’t justify repeating over and over again how helpless she is in dealing with this dog.

The Friend is sooooo boring in repeatedly playing this note about how no one can imagine how someone can take care of a large dog. But it’s so much worse than that. When we aren’t wasting our time repeatedly establishing Iris’s helplessness with the dog, we have to hear about how amazing Walter was and how no one can believe he killed himself. He was the perfect man with three devoted ex-wives, numerous students that he slept with, and a writing career that apparently placed him next to Hemingway in the pantheon of great men. Listening to the dialogue of The Friend you’d think Walter was Ernest Hemingway crossed with the sexual body count of Wilt Chamberlain and the likability of Tom Hanks.

At certain points I wondered if this was some form of boomer fanfiction? Walter is the only subject of conversation in the movie after he dies. Everyone’s life revolved around him, every woman wanted to sleep with him and every man wanted to be him. This is like how Adam Sandler tends to create characters “I’m independently wealthy, every woman wants me, no matter how awful I am, and every man wants to be my friend.” This Sandler-esque narrative, minus Sandler, is then elegantly crafted like an Adult Contemporary music video.

The Friend is a misfire, a great man movie starring women all talking about how great a man was before he killed himself. It’s clumsily assembled around the least interesting dog imaginable, an alien dog that no one can conceive of or connect with, aside from Walter from whose death, the dog cannot begin to recover. It makes sense that the dog worships Walter, that’s the dog/master relationship. But why are the women in The Friend just like the dog, worshipping this one man, rhapsodizing about how great he was as a writer, what a great lover he was, a great friend, and an esteemed professor who specialized in sleeping with his female students including Iris, his first wife, played by Carla Gugino, and a student who would become the mother of his only child. What a great guy.

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