‘The Friend’ – Review
Every now and then, a film arrives that reaches into your soul and takes hold with quiet power. It doesn’t shout or scream—it whispers. And when it does, you listen. The Friend, the 2025 feature film adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s beloved novel, directed with sublime restraint by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, is that rare cinematic experience. Tender, poetic, and emotionally profound, this is a film that doesn’t just tug on the heartstrings: it plays them like a symphony.
After the unexpected death of her closest friend and mentor, New York novelist and writing teacher Iris (Naomi Watts) becomes the caretaker of both his literary legacy and his beloved Great Dane, Apollo. Reluctantly bringing the enormous dog into her tiny Manhattan apartment, Iris develops a surprising kinship with the soulful animal—even though his outsized presence upends both her professional commitments and her daily routine. Together, the unlikely duo begins to move through their shared grief, tentatively embarking on a surprising path toward acceptance and healing.
Adapted from Nunez’s 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, The Friend was already a literary touchstone — an introspective, meditative exploration of grief, companionship, and the sacred bond between humans and animals. On screen, it becomes something even more intimate: a quiet character study of sorrow, survival, and the slow return to light after unthinkable loss. McGehee and Siegel’s translation of Nunez’s voice to cinema is masterful, and they’ve found a perfect partner in Naomi Watts, who gives the most vulnerable, full-bodied performance of her career.
At the centre of The Friend is Iris (Watts), a solitary, intelligent, quietly aching writer whose life is suddenly ruptured by the unexpected suicide of her mentor and dearest friend, Walter (Bill Murray, playing beautifully against type). Their connection, layered with intellectual intimacy, unspoken affection, and decades of shared history, is severed without warning, and what follows is not a dramatic breakdown, but the quiet, slow burn of real grief. To make matters more complex, Iris is left an unusual inheritance: Walter’s hulking six-year-old Great Dane, Apollo. A creature as lost and grief-stricken as Iris herself.
The setup is simple, but The Friend is anything but simplistic. This is a film of layers: emotional, psychological, and philosophical. It speaks softly, but carries immense weight. Iris and Apollo are both in mourning, and the emotional scaffolding of the film is built around the small moments of connection between them: an understanding glance, a shared silence, a new routine that quietly builds meaning.
Watts is extraordinary here. Stripped back, naturalistic, and completely present, she disappears into Iris. There’s no vanity in her performance, only truth. She brings to life the deep internal world of a character grappling with the absence of a person, of purpose, of a future she thought she understood. Her relationship with Apollo is never sentimentalised. Instead, it’s rendered with nuance and grace, and it’s through this connection, with a creature that cannot speak but understands everything, that Iris begins to heal.
The emotional depth of the story is matched by its aesthetic beauty. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens captures New York in a way rarely seen: not as a glittering metropolis, but as a living, breathing organism that reflects Iris’s interior state. Empty streets, golden-hour apartments, quiet bookstores — it’s a city of shadows and second chances. The score by Jay Wadley and Trevor Gureckis further deepens the emotional texture of the film, haunting and hopeful in equal measure.
And then, of course, there’s Walter. Though his death anchors the story, his presence lingers, both in memory and in ghostly flashes that haunt Iris’s imagination. Bill Murray’s performance is restrained and moving, appearing in fragments of recollection and one breathtaking moment of magical realism that brings Iris face to face with her grief. In the film’s third act, a conversation between Iris and Walter, born from memory, longing, and the writer’s imagination, unfurls with such emotional clarity that it leaves you breathless. It’s not just a scene; it’s a reckoning.
But perhaps the film’s most unexpected star is Bing the Great Dane, who plays Apollo with incredible soul. There’s something deeply human in his eyes, and McGehee and Siegel wisely let his silent presence carry much of the emotional load. The bond that forms between Bing and Watts on screen is nothing short of extraordinary. It’s never cutesy or forced. It’s raw, real, and deeply earned.
The Friend never overreaches. There are no big speeches, no sweeping catharses. Instead, it leans into stillness. It allows for ambiguity, for silence, for all the messy, murky feelings that come with loving and losing. And in doing so, it achieves something rare: emotional honesty. This is not just a story of grief, it’s a story of recovery. Of what it means to be human. Of how even the most broken among us can find companionship, meaning, and even joy again.
While some may expect a tearjerker, The Friend is something more delicate and more lasting. It’s a film that burrows under your skin and makes you think, feel, and reflect long after the credits roll. It’s about how we carry those we’ve lost with us, not just in our memories, but in how we live, how we love, and who we become in their absence.
For dog lovers, writers, quiet souls, and anyone who’s ever experienced the deep ache of missing someone, The Friend will feel like a balm. It’s a quiet revelation, and one of the most emotionally rich films of the year. Bring tissues. But more importantly, bring your heart wide open.
Image: Maslow Entertainment
