Victor Buhler (2020)

Matthew McNulty is remarkably truthful and engaging in this odd little film (available on Amazon Prime Video), despite the shaky script.  (Hard to pinpoint responsibility for that:  IMDb gives writing credits for Running Naked to Victor Buhler, Jennifer Knowles and Michael Knowles, ‘based on a screenplay’ by Matthew Ehlers, ‘after a story’ by Rob Wales.)  As young teenagers, Mark Doherty (Samuel Bottomley) and Ben Taylor (James Senneck) are neighbours on a cancer ward, where they become best mates.  Their acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) goes into remission.  Sixteen years later, Mark (McNulty) is an oncologist in the same hospital while Ben (Andrew Gower) is a hopeless case, toiling in a subterranean office job and slave to wide-ranging OCD.  Mark’s in a relationship, though it’s on the verge of collapse, with fellow medic Jade (Rakhee Thakrar).  Ben has no hope of a girlfriend.  The only entries on his calendar are his (late) mother’s birthday and weekly evening meetings with Mark.

Those with AML in early youth run an increased risk of its returning when they’re adults.  The two friends have annual blood tests to check there’s no recurrence of the condition.  Mark takes the sample from Ben in his flat because Ben won’t set foot in a hospital.  Their latest tests deliver bad news for one of the pair, which triggers a carpe diem drama-comedy (the comedy is pretty strenuous) that concludes with one protagonist dead and the other changed for the better.  All that is only to be expected but Victor Buhler – whose work has mostly been in American TV documentary and whose first (non-documentary) feature Running Naked is – took this viewer, at least, by surprise as to which way round the story would go.

Two potentially strong elements in the set-up are the enduring strength of the bond between Mark and Ben, and the former’s theory about the source of the latter’s multiple neuroses.  For a while, it’s intriguing that Mark – who’s spent years in medical school, has good looks, social skills and a demanding job – still makes room in his calendar for his old friend.  Worrywart Ben, with an unfortunate comb-over and clothes the colour of cardboard, is unrecognisable from the humorous, animated teenager of the film’s prologue.  Mark reckons Ben changed the day he learned his AML was in remission and became inordinately anxious to keep it there.  Over the years, Ben has ratcheted up his self-protective strategies to the extent of making his life not worth living.  When the dire annual test results come through, Mark makes Ben leave his job and start having some fun.

The big weakness of the screenplay is the gradually emerging premise that Mark’s life has turned out to be as paralysed as Ben’s – this can’t be so, given what’s happened since they were teenagers.  Mark does have two scenes – one at each end of the film – with a young AML patient he’s treating (Brandan Power).  In the first, he seeks to reassure by talking of his own teenage struggle with the disease; in the second, the boy’s AML is in remission.  Otherwise, Mark might as well be doing Ben’s dreary job for all that being a doctor means to him.  It doesn’t even occupy much time; when the moment comes to embark with Ben on bucket-list activities, Mark virtually stops going to work.  Running Naked is set in Stoke in Trent in the present day – or nearly the present day, since it’s plain to see shooting took place pre-2020.  Mark isn’t the only under-employed member of NHS staff – they mostly just stand around the hospital (the sequences there might have been shot by a Covid conspiracist).  Ben’s compulsive hand-washing doesn’t look outlandish now.  When a character suddenly launches into a continuous cough, you don’t hear it as the AML symptom it’s meant to be.

The film begins with the adolescent Mark and Ben daring to do what the title says, in the hospital corridors.  It’s a safe bet their thirty-something versions will do the same later in proceedings, and so they do.  (The two sequences are accompanied by a jokey sports commentary – from a voice I recognise but annoyingly can’t place, and which is uncredited on IMDb.)  Talking of bets:  gamblers on greyhound racing will likely marvel at the bookies’ generous odds when Ben and Mark go to a meeting – with Sara (Tamzin Merchant), the wine-bar waitress who becomes Ben’s girlfriend, and her work colleague (Emma Stansfield).   In the field of six dogs, the favourite is 3/1 and Ben backs a 25/1 winner.

The actors are generally good although Andrew Gower’s interpretation of dweebish Ben sometimes feels too emphatic – Victor Buhler’s inexperience in orchestrating a cast may have allowed this to happen.  As the younger Mark, Samuel Bottomley confirms the good impression he made recently in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie (2021).  Although he and Matthew McNulty aren’t physically similar, Bottomley manages to suggest an inner kinship between them that exposes all the more sharply how poorly conceived a character the adult Mark is.  Yet McNulty, as magnetic as he’s natural, is emotionally convincing.  While they’re happening, you believe, in spite of everything (and yourself), in each one of Mark’s interactions.  The one, temporary exception is when he hands over the fateful test results, Ben goes into meltdown and Mark’s lack of sympathy is hard to fathom.  Until, that is, it makes sense.

27 October 2021