The Friend

Directed by David Siegel and Scott McGehee, The Friend follows Naomi Watts’ Iris as she attempts to adjust to life with a large dog after she’s given custody of the animal in the wake of a friend’s (Bill Murray’s Walter) sudden death. It’s an exceedingly slight premise that’s employed to sporadically watchable yet mostly tiresome effect by Siegel and McGehee, as the filmmakers, armed with their own screenplay, deliver an often astoundingly deliberate drama that suffers from a disastrous lack of engrossing elements or dramatic heft – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by a disastrously overlong running time that comes to feel endless. The padded-out narrative, which boasts scene after scene of Watts’ character dealing with the dog, has been peppered with a whole host of needless digressions that exacerbate the less-than-enthralling atmosphere (eg everything involving Constance Wu’s pointless figure), and while the picture admittedly does possess a small handful of positive attributes (eg Watts’ agreeable performance, the scenic New York City views, etc), The Friend builds towards a shamelessly manipulative climax that’s hardly as emotionally affecting as Siegel and McGehee have surely intended – with the end result a movie that could (and absolutely should) have topped out at around 90 minutes. (There is a decent movie trapped in here somewhere, that’s for certain).

** out of ****