CinemaSerf

May 4, 2025

7.0

“Walter” (Bill Murray) is a cranky old author who decides that he’s had enough of life and so leaves his wife “Barbara” (Noma Dumezweni) with a four-foot, four-legged, slobbering problem. She decides that the best place for “Apollo” is with his longtime friend “Iris” (Naomi Watts). Bluntly, she would rather stick pins in her eyes, but she’s a bit of a sucker for a sob story and so soon she he has a new roomie in her tiny, rent-controlled, apartment where she is swiftly relegated from her bed to the floor. The mutt is clearly pining for his master, so she is going to have to learn how to get it to eat, sleep, do as it’s told and get off her mattress! Meantime, her friendly building supervisor has reminded her that pets are prohibited, and so she’d better come up with a plan B or else she might not even have the carpet to sleep on. What now ensues is an amiable bonding exercise that is entirely predictable, but that allows Watts and her canine companion to gently entertain us with some silly antics whilst addressing issues of friendship, trust and even a little betrayal. I thought it might have worked better on a stage, as the dialogue is rather more important here than the imagery, but with Murray featuring only sparingly there might be too much risk of the real star of the film - the dog - causing a bit of mayhem with an audience a few feet away! You’ll never remember this, even if you are the world’s greatest dog-lover, and it takes far too long to get going, but once the thing is up and running it’s a pleasant enough watch.

Naomi Watts inherits a 180-pound Great Dane after her mentor's suicide, and the film's whole trick is refusing to turn that into a cute rescue story. Apollo will not ride the elevator, takes over her bed, eats almost nothing for days, and Iris, a committed cat person with zero patience for dogs this size, has to learn to live around him instead of training him into something easier. What makes it work is how literally the film treats Apollo as a griever. He is not comic relief and he is not a metaphor with fur on it, he is a huge, physically demanding animal whose refusal to function normally mirrors exactly what Iris is going through and cannot say out loud. The dog playing him, a Great Dane named Bing trained by Bill Berloni, does more with stillness than most actors do with a full monologue, and the camera knows it, holding on him in doorways and low angles until his presence feels like weight in the room. Watts plays grief as a string of small, specific behaviors rather than a breakdown, reading her dead friend's old emails out loud to a dog who cannot understand a word and clearly needs to hear them anyway. It is slow on purpose. Nothing here resolves cleanly, which is the most honest thing about it, since neither does actual mourning. Closest comparison on this beat is Truman, another film that hands its grief to a dog instead of a person and trusts the animal to carry it. Full review here: https://dogwithblog.in/the-friend-movie-review/