Review of The Friend (d. Scott McGehee and David Siegel, 2025)

      It’s been seven years since Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award, bringing the writer and professor—whose first novel was published more than two decades earlier—a delayed but richly deserved level of acclaim. Perhaps that delay could be attributed in part to her not-at-all-broad style, which has long been uniquely introspective while enlivened by unexpected jolts of mordant wit. This includes The Friend, which centers on a single, middle-aged writer and professor of middling success (the parallels between this protagonist and Nunez herself are not at all coincidental) who comes into possession of her considerably more successful mentor’s Great Dane after he commits suicide. The title ostensibly refers to the mentor the protagonist so clearly loved—though in what way remains something of an open question—but comes to seem likelier to refer to Apollo, the harlequin-coated gentle giant that helps her process her deep-seated grief. While their budding, immensely charming relationship forms the backbone of the narrative, Nunez also weaves in wry commentary on the sexual politics of both the New York literary establishment and academia. That makes The Friend a book about someone whose identity has been subsumed by their unrequited lover, maybe even by the gnawing reality that so much of what she loves doesn’t love her back. Replete with its stunted main character’s musings on grief, literature, and the joys of pet ownership, it’s a strange book, of a piece with the rest of Nunez’s inimitable body of work and justly praised for its consistent upending of expectations.

 

      The new film adaptation of Nunez’s novel, also titled The Friend, is a fascinating case study in the challenges of adapting a singular work into another medium. Written and directed by longtime indie stalwarts Scott McGehee and David Siegel, some seemingly minor changes have sanded down some of Nunez’s most jagged edges. To begin with: what’s in a name? Our protagonist—whose constant, ambling inner monologues are reproduced with fidelity in the form of voice-over narration—is provided one here (“Iris,” played by a suitably pensive Naomi Watts). Perhaps structuring a movie around not just the exploits but the very thoughts of an unnamed character is a commercial nonstarter, but Nunez’s choice to withhold—deny, even—the reader this most basic level of personhood spoke volumes about how loneliness can hollow us into husks of the people we wished we were. Likewise, the deceased mentor, referred to only as “You” in the novel, is provided both a name here (“Walter”) and a real presence beyond the protagonist’s reminiscences and invocations (he’s played by Bill Murray). While the film’s voiceover maintains Nunez’s second person point of view and thus shreds of its interrogative intimacy, Walter can never take on You’s larger-than-life character (despite Murray’s best efforts) in no small part because the disjunctions between Iris’s inflated conception of him and who he really was can’t linger; if you want to know what the real Walter was like, just watch the needless flashback scenes—or an imagined post-death confrontation, added here late in the film, between he and Iris—that include Murray.

      There are other name-related changes that further neuter Nunez’s original text. Walter’s two surviving ex-wives—both writers whom we first meet at his funeral, sharing droll remembrances with Iris of the man they all once loved in spite of themselves—are also provided names (Carla Gugino plays “Elaine” while Costance Wu plays “Tuesday”); Nunez simply referred to them as “Wife Three” and “Wife Two,” a caustic choice that revealed wells of resentment underlying Iris’s pleasant interactions with both. Perhaps such a choice could’ve scanned as condescendingly sexist onscreen, denying these women their own individuation from Walter. Yet part of what made Nunez’s novel so compellingly thorny was the sense that an entire infrastructure made up of (much younger) women had been erected to appease gatekeeping men like Walter to realize their own writerly ambitions. While character ages are never mentioned in the film, Walter is at least twenty years older and bounds more successful than Iris or either of his ex-wives; McGehee and Siegel also retain the acrid, telling detail that Walter had been removed from his high-ranking position within a university’s English department for multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. They capture Nunez’s acerbic sense of humor about how women navigate professional environments dominated by the Walters of the world but not the bitter sense of resignation that it belies. Further, Iris no longer teaches writing to victims—mostly women—of human trafficking but is now just an under-appreciated literature professor (is there any other kind?) at Walter’s former employer. Nunez’s pointed and thorough detailing of the compromises and concessions women make to hold some bit of power within a system that is so evidently degrading to them barely registers here, and the film is tidier, blander, and all the worse for it.

 
      The film’s poster is structured around a triangle of faces: Watts’s and Murray’s on the top-left and -right, respectively, with Bing, the Dane playing Apollo at the bottom. I’ll propose another triangle: Nunez’s complex source material, American movie studios' (in this case, McGehee and Siegel’s own Big Creek Projects) demand for feel-good-until-you-feel-bad middlebrow tearjerkers, and the stilted adaptation that has resulted from their interaction. To be fair, the film is not without its pleasures: McGehee and Siegel are too well-acquainted with this sort of sensitive, adult-oriented material to render it completely anodyne, as glimmers of Nunez’s keenest insights still shine through. There’s also the matter of Apollo, the bridge between these two competing visions, played here by the greatest of Danes. Perhaps it’s so easy to fall in love with Bing alongside Iris because the camera loves him, too: within his galloping strides and doleful glances, he lends Nunez’s ruminations on grief a grand, fully-realized form that no faithfully-transposed monologue can attain. In this way, you can forgive McGehee and Siegel for sparing Apollo’s heartbreaking if inevitable fate in Nunez’s book: you can’t imagine this movie without him.