Having been recently diagnosed with serious heart problems and having also recently lost his wife in a car accident, James Bragg (Gary T. Smith) collapses when he’s informed that he has been fired from his job.  When he opens his eyes, he discovers that his office is on fire.  A man in a suit (Clay Butler) claims to be an agent with the Department of Homeland Security and he explains that the building has been bombed.

“By who?” James asks.

“Al Qaeda.  Boko Haram.  Mexican drug cartels,” the man replies.

James asks for the man for his name.  The man smiles and says that must people call him Bub.

Bub leads James through the burning building, explaining that he’s taking James to safety.  However, as the flames grow higher, James hears a voice saying, “Don’t follow him.”  Bub says that the voice is just a ploy of the terrorists but James isn’t quite so sure….

As soon as I tell you that 2023’s The Friend is faith-based film, you’ll probably be able to guess where this story is going.  Will James follow Bub onto the elevator going down or will he listen to the voice telling him not to follow.  Will James remember that Bub is a nickname for Beezlebub, one of the more fearsome of the demons that are said to populate Hell?  Will James make peace with the death of his wife and find the strength to continue?  Who will James’s new friend be?  Will it be Bub or will it be the older man who always seems to be showing up in the background?

Again, you can probably guess where all this is heading but The Friend is still a well-made and surprisingly well-acted meditation on life, death, and faith and, with the exception of two scenes, it’s a film that does a good job of avoiding the preachiness that one expects to find in films like this.  Along with co-directing and co-writing the script, Gary T. Smith starts in the film and he gives a good performance as a man overwhelmed by both his mortality and the loss of the person who gave his life meaning.  Smith does a good job of showing how it’s the little things that hurt us the most when we’re missing someone.  Even an act of kindness, like a co-worker expressing sincere sympathy, can cause the pain of a recent loss to flare up.  Of course, for many viewers, the film will work because it makes Bub a government agent.  The implication, whether deliberate or not, is that an authoritarian like Bub is right at home working as a federal agent and that he has no problem using James’s understandable fear of a terrorist attack as a way to convince James to give up everything that was previously important to him.  Obviously, I don’t know that the filmmaker had any sort of political statement in mind when they made Bub an agent of Homeland Security but it does certainly provide an interesting subtext to the film.

Actually, I’m a bit surprised that Bub didn’t apply for a job with TSA.  Imagine the pain and misery he could spread there!