Frank and Percy does not pretend to be a film about ideas. It is a film about two men on Hampstead Heath with their dogs, and what happens when loneliness unexpectedly meets its match. That it works as well as it does is almost entirely a function of Roger Allam and Ian McKellen, both of whom play this with the kind of ease that comes from having lived inside these characters long enough — they originated the roles on stage. Frank (Allam) is a retired history teacher, widowed a few years back, drifting through garden centres and charity shop volunteering where Derek Jacobi, as a salaried colleague, is allowed to sit while Frank must stand. That detail, small and perfectly chosen, tells you everything about Frank's diminished circumstances and bruised dignity. Percy (McKellen) is a donnish sociologist and climate scientist, acrimoniously separated, trying his luck on an app called Papa Search with results that produce broad comedy cameos from Ncuti Gatwa and Hugh Skinner. What Ben Weatherill's original stage play understood, and what Martin Sherman's adaptation preserves, is that the relationship between Frank and Percy isn't primarily about sexuality — it's about permission. Permission to feel, at 77, something you didn't know you still could. When Percy asks if he might kiss Frank, and Frank says yes, the film's best line follows: 'I felt like I did when I had a cataract removed.' Frank doesn't ultimately reach for a label — bisexual, gay — and the film is wise enough not to push him to one. The supporting cast is a full gallery of recognisable faces, and the results are mixed. Stephen Fry's waspish ex-partner tilts into caricature. Joanna Lumley's Belinda — Frank's sister-in-law, navigating early-onset dementia with flickering lucidity — is something else entirely, and gives the film its most genuinely moving moment: telling Frank, in a window of clarity, 'How lucky you are to have a broken heart at 77.' That line does more work than the autumnal woodwind score does in the entire runtime. Sean Mathias directs with competence and no particular flair — this is a filmed play that knows what it is and doesn't reach for more. The sitcom-broad characterisation in the supporting turns and the score's tendency to tell us exactly how to feel are the film's two consistent problems. But the central relationship earns its warmth honestly, and the Yorick moment — Percy scanning a churchyard's headstones and landing on a name with the line 'Oh my God! I've had him!' — is genuinely funny in the way that only gallows humour about ageing can be.
