The Friend review: Naomi Watts film beautifully captures the bond between humans and very good dogs

When the trailer was released for the 2017 movie The Mountain Between Us, the question everyone had was not whether Kate Winslet and Idris Elba’s characters would survive being stranded atop a snowy peak after their plane crashed.

It was whether the yellow Labrador in their company would make it to the end of the film. No wanted to watch this adorable waggy tail animal with the dopey eyes meet a grisly fate.

The online consternation got to the point where the studio, Sony, had to post on Facebook, before the film’s release, “The dog lives” alongside a video of the very good boy, to assure anxious would-be moviegoers that it was safe for them to buy tickets.

It’s not that we don’t care about human characters, even child ones, dying in movies and TV shows, but we’re really not OK with it happening to animals. There might be the lone masochist keen for an Old Yeller rewatch, but there’s a reason why the website Does the Dog Die exists.

More than two-thirds of Australian homes have a pet and the majority of those have a dog. The human-canine relationship is special, it’s pure and it’s ephemeral. We know we don’t have forever with them.

To save you the trouble of googling, the dog does not die in The Friend, but you will still cry because this film starring Naomi Watts and a 70kg harlequin Great Dane beautifully captures all the ways humans and dogs bring out the best in each other.

Watts plays Iris, a writer and academic who lives in New York City. Her good friend and mentor Walter (Bill Murray) unexpectedly dies and Iris is bereft, struggling to understand his death and process her grief.

She’s surprised when his wife Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), Walter’s third, tells her he left his beloved Great Dane to Iris. Barbara doesn’t like dogs and no one else can take Apollo so Iris takes him home to her one-bedroom apartment in a building that does not allow pets.

Like Iris, Apollo is also in mourning, and at first neither seem to connect as Iris attempts to rehome him while also fighting off eviction from her building’s owners who would be more than happy to be rid of their rent-controlled tenant.

The way the imperfect relationship between Iris and Apollo evolves over the film comes to stand in for her own bond with her departed friend, a man whose literary contributions, clever conversation and soft wryness is tangled in his at-times problematic history with women (Carla Gugino and Constance Wu play wives one and two).

As Iris reckons with her memories of Walter, his legacy and what he meant to her, she and Apollo become more and more important to each other.

The Friend, adapted by writers and directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee from the book by Sigrid Nunez, is a very New York film in that it has a hang-out vibe, at least of the literary and intelligentsia community.

There are many scenes of Iris and Apollo walking the city streets, where her petite frame and his large body cut a striking duo. There are also just the other characters that populate the film that bring the many layers of NYC, the warmth (Ann Dowd as her neighbour and friend, Sarah Pidgeon as Walter’s recently discovered love child Val) and the oddballs (Wu’s passive-aggressive second wife).

Watts is wonderful in this film, carrying the interiority of a woman who has more questions than answers, without ever imposing on the audience. There’s a lightness to her performance that still has the gravity of emotional groundedness.

Despite his name and image being all over the marketing, Murray is not in the film for very much but his presence in those few scenes count. He’s always been able to balance an easygoing affability with a quiet sadness.

You understand how these two people could be what they meant to each other, and how a dog like Apollo (the canine actor is called Bing) could sense the kindness in them both.

The Friend is a stirring and thoughtful film that taps into that exquisite connection between humans and every very good dog.

Rating: 3.5/5

The Friend is in cinemas on July 31