Traditionally, the year-end holiday season has been the time for two classic Hollywood templates — the Christmas-themed family movie and the old-fashioned romcom. Of these, the former has been delivering diminishing returns across the last decade. The latter, however, is showing signs of recovery after a poor beginning in the 2020s. And the latest symptom of said revival might just be Merv, Amazon Prime’s latest romantic comedy, premiering on December 10.
Directed by the British writer-director Jessica Swale (maker of the excellent Summerland), Merv follows an estranged couple who share custody of their dog. Since their breakup, Merv the dog has been depressed and listless, and to cheer him up, Russ (Charlie Cox) and Anna (Zooey Deschanel) agree to go on a Florida beach trip together. As a line from the trailer goes, “You know he was happiest when we were all hanging out together and having fun”.
It’s essentially The Parent Trap but with an adorable dog instead of a child actor. Merv arrives at a time when Hollywood has several films built around their canine stars, and across different genres, too. Clearly, when marketing departments are running out of ‘organic’ promotional strategies, dogs are seen as an easy sell, and for good reason. Dogs make everything and everyone around them better, softer, kinder.
Unconditional love
The actor Grant Gustin, best known as the star of The Flash (the TV series, not the film) appeared in a pair of canine-themed movies a couple of years ago. In the romantic comedy Puppy Love, Gustin and Lucy Hale play young people who meet on a disastrous first date and agree to never cross paths again. However, their respective dogs are already inseparable, and before they know it, they’re sharing custody of a brand-new litter of puppies.
Puppy Love doesn’t really tug at the heartstrings in the way Gustin’s Rescued by Ruby does. In the coming-of-age film based on a true story, Gustin plays Daniel, a well-meaning but tone-deaf and clumsy young man who has tried and failed six times to become a search and rescue officer with the local police’s K-9 unit. When Daniel meets Ruby, a border collie with a terrible temper, the two strike an unlikely bond, and they eventually join the K-9 unit.
Another grade-A tear-jerker from 2025 is the Naomi Watts-Bill Murray drama The Friend, based on the Sigrid Nunez novel of the same name. Murray plays Walter, a well-known writer struggling with depression. After Walter dies by suicide, his close friend Iris (Watts) is left with custody of his gigantic, arthritic Great Dane called Apollo. Together, the lady and the dog help each other grieve the loss of the one human they both loved unconditionally.
I really enjoyed watching The Friend on the large screen, especially because of the palpable rapport between Watts and Bing the dog, who played Apollo. While dogs are associated with uncomplicated joy, they are just as likely to be grief-counsellors-by-proxy, and I’m glad The Friend depicted this reality with grace and humility.
A dog’s POV
The most unusual dog-centric film I have ever seen also happened earlier this year — Ben Leonberg’s directorial debut, the horror film Good Boy. The premise of this film is simple but it leaves the makers with considerable technical challenges — the story follows Indy the dog, who is convinced that her owner Todd is being haunted by a supernatural entity that lives in the house they (i.e. Todd and Indy) have just moved into. What makes the situation even tricker is that Indy alone can see the supernatural entity in question — a reference to ‘dogs-seeing-ghosts’ being a trope in horror movies like The Exorcist and Poltergeist.
I don’t want to reveal too much because the film’s magic lies in its technical skills and the way it centres Indy in the narrative. Humans in the film are seldom shown from the waist up, mirroring the average dog’s field of vision. Indy is shot from extremely low angles in the dark, and Leonberg has done a fantastic job with these scenes that really force you to see the world from a dog’s point of view.
The film was shot on a shoestring budget of just $70,000 and it has gone on to earn more than $8 million at the box office. For much of the film’s shooting, there were just three people present on-set: Leonberg, his wife and producer Kari Fischer, and Indy, who is the couple’s real-life dog as well.
The trio recently gave some interviews together and they remind me of ‘slow cinema’ pioneer Kelly Reichardt, whose own dog appeared in several of her late 2000s indie triumphs. So if you love a good dog movie, the aforementioned films should be on your list this season.
Aditya Mani Jha is working on his first book of non-fiction.
Published – December 05, 2025 06:00 am IST
