By M. Faust

If you’ve seen the trailers for the new film The Friend, you may have assumed that the title refers to the large dog that figures prominently. You would be mistaken (though probably by the design of those sneaky trailer cutters). It actually refers to Iris (Naomi Watts), a writer of middle age and middling success. She teaches in Manhattan where she lives in a rent-controlled studio apartment inherited from her father, and has all but given up on her most recent attempt at a novel. 

For years her closest friend has been Walter (Bill Murray), a successful novelist when she met when she was his student. The relationship was briefly inappropriate but survived that, something of which the thrice-married Walter took some pride. 

What the relationship is unlikely to survive is Walter’s death, by suicide. Despite having been hired by him to edit a volume of correspondences, Iris has no idea why he took that ultimate step. 

Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, but what about the dog? He is a Great Dane named Apollo, whom Walter discovered during a run in the park. Apollo is very much not wanted by wife No. 3, who browbeats Iris into taking him home and figuring out what to do with him. Did I mention that Iris’s apartment, while cozy enough for a single woman, is far too small for a dog who is larger than his host? Or that the building has a strict no-pets policy? 

The Friend gets a certain measure of comedy out of the efforts of Iris, who defines herself as a cat person, to deal with this unexpected and unwanted imposition. But that is not really the point of the film, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel by co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who have made a career out of this kind of small-scale literary drama (Bee Season, The Deep End, What Maisie Knew—don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of any of these). 

Impossible for the eye to avoid, Apollo is a large, lumbering metaphor for Iris’s relationship to Walter. She can no more get answers from the dog about what drove her dear friend to kill himself than she can from Walter himself. He was the kind of fellow he would enliven parties with quips like, “You know, the more suicidal people there are, the less suicidal people there are,” a comment that certainly rings less waggishly after he removed himself from the general population. 

Bill Murray isn’t in the movie very much, but when he is he is very good. Has he finally decided to become an actor again instead of simply everyone’s favorite smartass? He was good in a different way as a hit man in the recent (and generally lousy) Riff Raff. 

What makes the movie well worth seeing is Naomi Watts. At the age of 56 (I didn’t believe it either, but I looked it up), her face has developed lines of character that offset the blandness that often befalls blonde actresses onscreen. She has been consistently good over the last 30 years (with two Oscar nominations), generally in films that did not get a big theatrical push. The closest she ever got to the kind of MCU work that takes too many good actors out of circulation was in Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, and since then she seems to have decided that smaller is better. The Friend rambles on a bit longer than it should have—I could have done without the whole trip-to-Michigan sequence—but it is an engaging, relatable drama that was a pleasure to spend time with. 

The only possible way to segue to another new film, Freaky Tales, is to note that like The Friend it was also directed by a duo, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Like McGehee and Siegel, they have also worked primarily on small-scale character-oriented dramas like Half Nelson and It’s Kind of a Funny Story. They did stray into MCU territory a few years back with 2019’s Captain Marvel, but despite that film grossing more than $1 billion internationally they don’t seem to have adjusted their career goals. 

Or maybe they have, because I really don’t know what to make of this new release, which arrives on theater screens with a copyright date of 2023. The film is comprised of four separate but interconnected stories, very much in the mode of Pulp Fiction. It was inspired by Fleck’s youth in Oakland, Calif., where the stories are set. From what I have read after seeing the movie, it is filled with visual and musical homages to the culture of the city at that time, but that isn’t likely to mean much to you unless you lived in Oakland. 

On their own merits, the tales are the most engaging when they are the least freaky. I most enjoyed the first two, about the patrons of a hardcore punk club who band together to fight back against the neo-Nazis who have been abusing them, and about two young women with aims to hip-hop greatness who turn an event designed to humiliate them to their advantage. 

The film’s big box office draw, Pedro Pascal, stars in the third story as a collector of gambling debts who wants to quit that business to raise his about-to-be-born child. Pascal fits the classic definition of a movie star, someone that you can’t take your eyes off of when he’s onscreen, and the filmmakers make the most of him, even if the story itself feels a bit underbaked. Perhaps to compensate, it features a guest appearance by a Big Star Whom Everyone Likes in a cameo as memorable as Christopher Walken’s in Pulp Fiction. 

The last story is the one that you will either love or hate. It reimagines a local basketball star as a martial arts student who seeks revenge on the neo-Nazi mob that has threaded through the movie. It has minimal plot and maximum violence, to the point where it becomes ridiculous (presumably intentionally). 

I don’t know how this movie was funded or why it sat on the shelf for over a year, other than the suspicion that the finale is too gruesome for mass audiences. It is the definition of a cult movie, made with clear affection for its characters and the era it seeks to recreate, and with the expectation that not everyone is going to get it.