Our Friend Review: A Real Heart Breaking Story!

Our Friend stars Jason Segel, Dakota Johnson, and Casey Affleck in the lead roles, and the narrative of the film explores a friend, who moves in with a family after the mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and doesn’t have too much time left to live. It is strange, but somehow Ben and Casey Affleck can play miserable on-screen very easily. In Our Friend, Casey’s character Matt plays a pretty miserable husband/father/writer that alienates everything and everyone around him.

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Jason Segel is also pretty good in this movie as someone that was clearly dealing with his mental issues but putting his friends first. He was able to bring forward his humor at the right times and just a calmness to the character that was fitting for the story. I also feel that this movie achieves the sadness that the whole family and Dane (Segel) went through with the terminal diagnosis.

I was also really impressed with Isabella Kai as the oldest daughter, Molly in the family. She gives a strong performance as someone that was incredibly frustrated and angry with everything that she had to go through. Onto the negatives, I appreciated the story of Our Friend, but how it was delivered almost was too distracting at times. It would jump back and forth to explain the story, and it would almost make you feel like you need to know more about what happened in that time jump that you need to lock into where we were in the story.

It also didn’t help that outside of Dakota Johnson’s character deteriorating physically you don’t see any of the characters’ age at all so knowing where we were in the story can be a little confusing if you look away when the screen shows what year it was.

Speaking of Johnson, there are times when she is really good, but it felt like they didn’t give her character Nicole more time to give Johnson more of a chance to shine. It almost feels like her character is lost in the story and you only see it from Segel’s and Affleck’s point of view. I was also very distracted by Affleck’s character Matt’s wardrobe that was incredibly out of touch dad style that didn’t fit Affleck.

I went into this movie thinking it would be sad as I knew where it was leading to, but it still hits you pretty hard throughout the film. I found some of the twists were pretty easy to point out what would happen but the fact that this was based on a real-life story makes this feel more authentic emotionally. A pretty solid but sad movie. Rent ‘Our Friend’ on demand here.

Rating – 3.5/5 | Grade – B+

Review by Bobby Mack
Follow Mack on IG @mmreview

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