‘Plainclothes’ Review: Russell Tovey And Tom Blyth Smolder In A Story Of Star-Crossed Lovers – Sundance Film Festival

Damon Wise

27 January 2025 at 8:08 pm·3-min read

With gay rights coming back into the crosshairs in almost every country across the globe, Carmen Emmi’s slow-burn drama is sobering reminder of just how far these things have progressed in the past 30 years. Taking place primarily in 1997 — unfolding in flashback from the framing device of a family New Year’s Eve party being held a few years later — it takes a little while to find its feet. Once the main players are established, though, and experimental flashes of harsh analog video become a more recognizable manifestation of its ugly-beautiful aesthetic, Plainclothes builds to a very satisfying conclusion, putting a torrid but meaningful gay love affair at the center of a universal coming-of-age story.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart is an unlikely reference point, not because Plainclothes is a genre film — though it shares a tiny bit of DNA with William Friedkin’s much more crudely articulated thriller Cruising — but because it deals with the disjunct between the mind’s needs and the body’s desires. For Lucas (Tom Blyth), that dichotomy is played out literally in his daily life. As an undercover policeman, his job is to loiter near the men’s bathroom at the local shopping mall and seduce passing trade into committing acts of what his superiors would call gross indecency. As a good-looking twentysomething, his strike rate is pretty healthy, and he has the routine down pat: no talk, no physical contact and, most important of all, no following the suspect into the toilet stall.

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Lucas knows very well that what he’s doing is entrapment, and ethics of the job become even murkier when it is revealed that the majority of his victims are married men, who plead guilty simply to avoid the embarrassment of going to court. More significantly, Lucas is in the middle of a breakup, on the grounds that he “might like guys,” and his tortured conscience becomes ever more visible in the workplace, where the chief refers to his victims as perverts, suggesting that casual gay sex is a gateway to serious psychopathic crimes.

Push comes to shove when Lucas cruises a strikingly handsome middle-aged man (Russell Tovey) and ushers him into the bathroom, where he breaks all of the aforementioned rules. Unable to go through with it, Lucas runs back out into the mall, gesturing to his colleague that the sting came to nothing. The stranger, however, walks on ahead, dropping a scrap of paper bearing an anonymous phone number and handwritten message: “Give me some time to return your call.”

Fascinated by the older man, Lucas arranges to meet him at a vintage cinema that shows old movies, and the romantic grandeur of the setting reflects the depth of Lucas’s crush. They exchange names; the stranger is called Andrew, but Lucas gives his name as Gus — the name of his recently deceased father — a decision that will come back to bite him. The cinema is too public for what they have in mind, so they arrange to meet in a remote greenhouse, where they have sex for the first time. Lucas thinks it’s the start of a beautiful thing but misses all the signals that Andrew is sending, putting boundaries between them that Lucas chooses to ignore. Puppy love turns to obsession when Lucas runs a check on Andrew’s license plates, a decision that will have disastrous consequences for both.

The smoldering chemistry between the two is palpable, and Blyth is especially good as a young man wrestling with his identity. Plainclothes, though, is not strictly a coming-out movie, it’s a relatable story about infatuation and heartbreak, most of it communicated with painfully raw emotion by these star-crossed lovers’ eyes.

Title: Plainclothes
Festival: Sundance (U.S. Dramatic Competition)
Sales agent: WME Independent
Director/screenwriter: Carmen Emmi
Cast: Tom Blyth, Russell Tovey, Maria Dizzia, Christian Cooke, Gabe Fazio, Amy Forsyth
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

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