24-04-2025
The Friend review — a warm, witty story about grief and a Great Dane
It's strange to cheer the glaring absences in a movie, yet part of the slick narrative accomplishment of this 'quirky animal adventure' is its refusal to obey the rules. This is a film about a resentful human who reluctantly adopts a difficult animal but slowly learns to find emotional meaning and philosophical significance in the beast, leading to personal growth and self-actualisation. You've seen it countless times before, with Richard Gere and a devoted akita in Hachi: A Dog's Tale, or Anna Paquin and motherless geese in Fly Away Home, or even Steve Coogan and a Magellanic penguin in last week's The Penguin Lessons. The Friend, however, is the same but gloriously different.
The animal here is a Great Dane called
