Apollo Is a Dog in Mourning in “The Friend”

If a movie has both Bill Murray and a gigantic dog in it, it’s got to be a comedy, right? Definitely not, if we’re talking about “The Friend,” a 2024 film about life, death, and grief. Murray plays Walter, a big-deal writer in New York who commits suicide, leaving behind three ex-wives, a couple of girlfriends, and a great dane called Apollo.

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel of the same name (winner, National Book Award), the narrative is largely concerned with the question, “What will happen to the dog?”

The question is left to Iris, played by Naomi Watts. Iris is Walter’s friend, lover, and editor who reluctantly inherits Apollo and then has to navigate city life with a ginormous animal – as well as to figure out how to deal with her own grief.

New Yorkers will appreciate the tension of Iris’s more mundane predicament: she will lose her rent-controlled Park Slope apartment if she keeps Apollo. These issues – the grief and the apartment – are cleverly resolved in the same way, which we won’t spoil here.

The film does not lean heavily into the comic potential of this odd coupling – sad woman and giant dog. It does zoom in on the dog himself, a harlequin great dane with expressive eyes. Iris quickly realizes that Apollo is mourning just as deeply as she, probably more so. The movie does a lot of things well, but nothing better than its illumination of what dogs can mean to us, and we to them.

The big guy is portrayed by a natural actor named Bing, duly listed in the closing credits in the order in which he appeared. The film also acknowledges the Great Danes of Central Park, which supplied a number of extras to keep Apollo company.

Photo credit: Bleecker Street