The Friend
Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, and adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel of the same name, The Friend is a literary, melancholic balancing act. Unlike French Exit, where Michelle Pfeiffer flees to Paris with a talking cat that may or may not be her reincarnated husband, The Friend remains firmly rooted – both tonally and geographically – in the pavements of New York City. The presence of celebrated novelist Walter (Bill Murray), a towering figure in New York’s literary circles, remains long after his sudden death, embodied in Apollo, the enormous, silently judging Great Dane he leaves to Iris (Naomi Watts), his close friend and former student. Apollo doesn’t speak, but his presence is overwhelming, haunting Iris’s cramped apartment and tracing every step of her faltering attempts to move on from the defining bond she shared with her late mentor. His sheer size is at once absurd and poignant, a living metaphor for the unresolved weight of her grief.
But The Friend isn’t really about a dog – it’s about writing: the torment of writer’s blocks, the mythology that clings to authorship, and the disillusioning truths of the publishing world. Walter’s orbit of women – three younger ex-wives, an illegitimate daughter, and Iris herself – all look to him with a collegiate reverence. The past clings like a second skin: Iris sleeps in a faded Berkeley t-shirt, and there’s a subtle subplot involving Walter’s worn Columbia jersey, which both Iris and Apollo hold onto like a sacred relic. These visual details – from golden afternoons in Washington Square Park to book-lined apartments and townhouses that seem lifted from the pages of Architectural Digest – add a layer of romanticism to the film’s otherwise grounded realism.
However, for all its attention to detail, the film struggles to capture the full weight of its source material. Iris’s many musings and monologues, along with the weight of Walter’s lingering presence, are dulled – if not lost – by the constraints of the cinematic form, despite strong performances from Watts and Murray. This isn’t a flaw in execution, but rather the inherent limitation of adapting a novel so deeply rooted in the act of writing into a different medium. And for all the strengths of The Friend, much like Apollo himself, it often feels as though it was meant to occupy a larger, more expansive space.
Christina Yang
The Friend is released nationwide on 25th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for The Friend here:
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