‘The Friend’ Review: Naomi Watts Inherits a Handful in a Dog Movie That’s Really About Accepting Mortality
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Before his death, French actor Alain Delon had said that he wished for his dog, Loubo, to be put down when he passed.
Delon believed the bond between him and his rescued Belgian Malinois was so strong that the dog would miss him dearly when he died and preferred to spare his pet such pain. (In the end, Delon’s children assured the press that Loubo would be spared.) How does one explain death to a dog?
That question, and several others deeper than we might expect from a “dog movie,” give intellectual heft to “The Friend,” a gentle coping-with-grief drama that provides its audience with a 180-pound emotional support animal in the form of Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane who’s missing his master and headed for the proverbial glue factory unless a bighearted enough human agrees to adopt him.
Naomi Watts plays that human in a by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with a bit more on its mind than your typical canine-centric tearjerker.
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