It's a shame that the Patsy Award, which is awarded to 1986, no longer exists for the best appearance of an animal in a film or a series. After earlier award winners such as Flipper, Lassie or Orangey, the cat from “Breakfast at Tiffany”, the German Dogge Bing would have been a clear favorite in 2025. The giant four -legged friend shows in the tragicomic drama “Loyal“An amazing facial spectrum: This is how he succeeds in making the audience with his canvas presence seemingly effortless to laugh, cry, be amazed or thought.
Again and again Bing plays his first -class human scene partners Naomi Watts (“Mulholland Dr.”) and Bill Murray (“The Phone Castle”) on the wall. Thanks to the animal occupation coup, the “The Happiness of Big Things” directors Scott McGeee and David Siegel start with a huge pound in their film adaptation of the novel “The friend” of Sigrid Nunez*, which was added by the New York Times 2024 to the list of the 100 best novels of the 21st century. In any case, the author seems to be very difficult: Last year, another film adaptation of one of her novels, “The Room Next Door” by Pedro Almodóvar, won the Golden Lion at the Film Festival in Venice.
Iris (Naomi Watts) lives in such a tiny apartment that her unplanned house guest hardly fits.
The unsuccessful author Iris (Naomi Watts) has to stay afloat with writing courses at an evening school in order to continue to be able to afford her tiny apartment in Manhattan. Currently the mid -forties are going through a particularly hard time: after all, she somehow has to process the suicide of her much more popular writer Walter (Bill Murray), her only real friend.
Still shocked by the suicide, Iris learns as part of the opening of the will, that her mentor bequeathed his beloved German mastiff Apollo. Initially, Iris takes up the idiosyncratic animal with her dead friend. It doesn't take long for her to feel that Apollo also mourns his owner – and that she could therefore be a support for each other. But that is easier thought than done …
Mourn together
“There is a pony on your bed. A very sad pony.” The presumption of the neighbor Ann Dowd (“The Handmaid's Tale”) played by Emmy winner) is not as absurd as it sounds-because the dog actually has the size of a small horse. The German mastiff seems almost a grotesque in the tiny apartment – especially when Apollo refuses to go down from Iris' bed. What, in turn, forces the rent that pays the rent to present with an air mattress instead.
Apollo does not want to eat or drink and has bitten into an old T-shirt of his master. Since he cannot speak, Iris has to find a way to bring him back into an orderly life – and at the same time. It touches how she initially tries in vain to cope with the complexity of her own mental chaos, while at the same moment she has to deal with the dog, which is lying around apathetically around the next moment. Death and how we try to deal with the loss of beloved people are the central themes of “Loyal Friend”.
With the mastiff owner Walter (Bill Murray) Iris lost her best friend!
The film looks neither melancholy nor sugared, but surprisingly authentic. Naomi Watts is excellent as a woman who tries to understand her feelings for an as lovable and spacious and manipulative and apparently deeply frustrated man. Even when McGee and Siegel bring the film on the home stretch with an almost unnecessary and clumsy fantasy sequence almost to be derailed. At that moment, the “21 gram” star keeps the work going before the directors still get the curve to let the whole thing go for a melancholy but conciliatory end.
From the beginning we suspect what the relationship between Iris and Apollo will amount to despite various obstacles. Iris' conditions for the human figures, on the other hand, are deliberately kept vague. The audience remains freedom for speculation and their own conclusions, which the plot give significantly more color than it could have defined explanations. We quickly dive into this microcosm out of affection and animosities, resentment, generosity, compassion, jealousy and unexpected alliances.
Soulful and bitter
It is clear that Walter was the one who connected them all-including his pompous, but still very uncertain publisher (Josh Pais), his three (ex) women (Carla Gugino, Constance Wu and Noma Dumezweni) and his daughter Val (Sarah Pidgeon) from one of the many extracurred love affairs, which also included Iris. Again and again there are flashbacks to individual episodes and conversations between her and Walter with others from their clique. They are all dominated by Bill Murray, whose figure sometimes dust dry, then very thoughtful, but always charismatic.
A good example of this is a dinner party at the beginning: While Walter tells the others of how he got to Apollo, everyone hangs on his lips. The film remains charming in a bitter sweet way. So we only suffer all too willingly when Iris threatens to fly out of her apartment because pets in the building are not allowed. And in the emotional finale, our breath stalls for an almost unbearable moment before we can blow through deeply calmly. The soulful, warming story will not only touch dog friends, but also everyone who has ever lost someone close to someone.
Conclusion: An intimate, emotionally gripping story about how humans and animals can support each other in order to deal with even difficult phases characterized by grief in life.