The Friend
Directed by Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Written by Scott McGehee, David Siegel
Starring Naomi Watts, Bill Murray, Carla Gugino, Sarah Pidgeon
Release Date April 4th, 2025
Published April 8th, 2025
How do you mess up a concept as simple as having Bill Murray and a Great Dane in a movie together? This should be the easiest movie in the world to make, you just put Bill and the dog together in a location and watch the comedy burst forth. Sadly, the boomer male fan-fic, The Friend can’t do something as simple as let a funny man and a cute dog be funny and cute. Instead, they need to make an utterly obnoxious movie in which Bill Murray’s character is a stand-in for every male boomer fantasy and all women spend all of their time talking about how great he was. Oh, and there is a dog, I guess.
The actual central character of The Friend is played by Naomi Watts. Watts is Iris, a writer who happens to be best friends with Bill Murray’s Walter, a writer of prodigious talent and legend. When Walter takes his own life, Iris is left to care for Walter’s dog, Apollo, a massive Great Dane that his wife does not want and that his adult daughter (Sarah Pidgeon) is not capable of caring for. Iris, a writer herself, has nothing but time on her hands, what with her severe writer’s block, so she takes on the dog problem despite not being allowed to have a dog in her rent controlled New York City apartment.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
