Carmen Emmi’s debut feature excavates a forgotten chapter of American queer history, transforming state-sanctioned persecution into a meditation on love, loyalty, and the terrible mathematics of survival.
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Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
There is a moment in Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes—about forty minutes into this quietly devastating debut feature—when Lucas, the young undercover police officer played with remarkable restraint by Tom Blyth, catches his own reflection in a public lavatory mirror. The fluorescent light above flickers intermittently, casting his face in alternating shadow and harsh white illumination. For a beat, perhaps two, he simply stares at himself, and in that suspended instant, the entire film crystallises around a single, unbearable question: what does it mean to be both hunter and hunted, enforcer and victim of the same cruel system?
Set against the backdrop of Syracuse, New York, in the mid-1990s, Plainclothes arrives at a cultural moment when the gap between public morality and private desire had reached a particularly toxic crescendo. Lucas, a working-class undercover officer, is tasked with entrapping and apprehending gay men in public spaces, using his youth and conventional attractiveness as bait. What transforms this potentially sensationalist setup into something profound is Emmi’s understanding that such operations weren’t aberrations but systematic manifestations of a society’s anxieties about masculinity and social order.
The central tension emerges when Lucas becomes emotionally—and erotically—entangled with Andrew, played by Russell Tovey with desperate tenderness. Andrew is married, closeted, and caught in his own web of deception. Tovey, known for his work in Years and Years, creates a character who feels less like a plot device than a wounded animal, beautiful and wary in equal measure.
The genius of Emmi’s screenplay lies in its refusal to simplify the moral landscape. Lucas isn’t merely a closeted officer struggling with his sexuality; he’s a young man who has found, in police work, both stability and a form of masculinity that society rewards. His assignment places him in the impossible position of policing the very desires he’s beginning to recognise in himself. This isn’t just dramatic irony—it’s a precise examination of how oppressive systems recruit their own victims as enforcers.
Blyth, who gained attention in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, delivers a performance of remarkable nuance. His Lucas never feels like a cipher but rather like a young man slowly awakening to the terrible complexity of his situation. The actor understands how to convey internal conflict through physical restraint, allowing audiences to read volumes in a nervous laugh or shaking hands whilst lighting a cigarette.
The film’s visual language eschews glossy period-piece aesthetics in favour of something grittier and more immediate. The camera frequently positions itself as another form of surveillance, lingering on furtive glances and stolen moments with voyeuristic intensity. Public spaces—parks, toilets, and shadowy corners that served as meeting places for gay men—are rendered with particular attention to their double nature as sites of both connection and danger.
Emmi’s direction reveals an understanding of how surveillance operates not merely as state control but as psychological condition. The constant threat of exposure permeates every frame, creating paranoia that feels both historically specific and unnervingly contemporary. In our era of digital surveillance, the film’s exploration of watching and being watched takes on additional meaning.
What distinguishes Plainclothes from other LGBTQ+ historical dramas is its sophisticated understanding of power dynamics. The film doesn’t present homophobia as individual prejudice but examines it as structural force shaping institutions and individual psychology. Lucas’s position as enforcer of anti-gay laws whilst struggling with his own sexual identity becomes a lens through which to examine how oppression operates through the recruitment of the oppressed themselves.
The title operates on multiple levels. “Plainclothes” refers literally to Lucas’s undercover status, but also suggests how identity itself becomes camouflage. Everyone in this world is, in some sense, in disguise—hiding behind socially acceptable façades. The tragic irony is that Lucas’s professional disguise forces him to confront the personal disguise he’s worn his entire life.
The film’s exploration of masculinity proves particularly compelling. Being a police officer provides Lucas masculine legitimacy that his emerging sexuality threatens to undermine. The uniform—even civilian clothes worn for undercover work—becomes both armour and prison. Emmi understands that coming out isn’t just about revealing sexual orientation; it’s about dismantling an entire architecture of identity built around social expectations.
The chemistry between Blyth and Tovey provides the film’s emotional anchor, but it’s chemistry built on mutual recognition rather than simple attraction. Both men see in the other a reflection of their own predicament—desire constrained by social expectations, identity fractured by the need for concealment. Their relationship develops with the particular intensity of the forbidden, each stolen moment carrying the weight of potential catastrophe.
Plainclothes premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival to considerable critical acclaim, with reviewers noting its relevance to contemporary discussions about policing, identity, and institutional power. The film’s 96-minute runtime feels precisely calibrated, building tension through accumulation rather than melodramatic peaks. Emmi understands that the most powerful moments emerge from restraint: a hand almost touched, a glance held too long, the weight of unspoken words.
In our current cultural moment, when debates about LGBTQ+ rights continue and the relationship between police and marginalised communities remains fraught, Plainclothes offers neither easy answers nor comfortable resolutions. Instead, it provides something more valuable: a clear-eyed examination of how oppression functions at the most intimate level, turning individuals against themselves in service of maintaining social hierarchies.
The film’s refusal to provide simple catharsis marks it as particularly mature work. There are no easy villains—only people trapped within systems demanding they choose between authenticity and survival. This moral complexity elevates Plainclothes beyond historical drama into something approaching classical tragedy: good people making impossible choices within systems designed to destroy them.
What lingers after the credits is not just Lucas and Andrew’s particular story but broader questions about complicity, resistance, and survival. In a world where being true to oneself can mean social death, what forms of compromise become necessary? How do individuals maintain humanity whilst participating in inhumane systems?
Plainclothes represents more than promising debut; it’s a vital addition to ongoing conversations about how societies police desire and identity. Through careful attention to concealment’s psychological costs and sophisticated understanding of power dynamics, the film illuminates not just a dark chapter in LGBTQ+ history but ongoing mechanisms through which marginalised communities are controlled.
The film’s greatest achievement may be demonstrating that love—even forbidden love—can exist within systems designed to crush it. There’s something miraculous about the tenderness emerging between Lucas and Andrew despite their circumstances. It’s tenderness stolen from history itself, preserved against all odds.
In the end, Plainclothes succeeds because it refuses to look away from difficult truths about desire, power, and survival’s price. It trusts audiences to grapple with complexity, to sit with discomfort, to recognise that the most important stories are often the most painful. In an era of increasing polarisation, such trust feels like a radical act of faith in cinema’s capacity to illuminate rather than merely entertain.
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