Main cast: Tom Blyth (Lucas Brennan), Russell Tovey (Andrew Waters), Maria Dizzia (Marie Brennan), Christian Cooke (Ron), Gabe Fazio (Uncle Paul), Amy Forsyth (Emily), John Bedford Lloyd (Lieutenant Sollars), Darius Fraser (Jeff), and Alessandra Ford Balazs (Jessie)
Director: Carmen Emmi
Oh good, another queer cinema masterpiece has arrived to save us all from the tyranny of coherent storytelling and emotional restraint.
Plainclothes, the 2025 “gay police thriller” that’s about as thrilling as watching paint dry through a dirty VHS camcorder, is yet another tale of a conflicted closeted man discovering himself.
Wait, this time it’s wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of a serious historical drama about police entrapment of gay men in the 1990s. Yes, director and screenwriter Carmen Emmi uses the genuinely dark and significant history of police entrapment — when homophobia ran rampant and queer men risked arrest for seeking connection in restrooms, backrooms, and adult cinemas — as mere set dressing for what is essentially the ten-thousandth coming-out melodrama.
Lucas Brennan, played by the fellow who brought us Coriolanus Snow, is an undercover cop who falls for Andrew Waters, the man he’s supposed to be entrapping. And thus, a story that could have explored systemic homophobia, institutional cruelty, and the devastating impact of state-sanctioned persecution becomes a backdrop for Lucas’s journey to self-acceptance. How revolutionary.
Anyone who’s watched more than three queer films knows exactly where this is headed: Lucas has a homophobic family, acts like a bigot himself because it’s all he knows, Andrew exists solely to martyr himself while encouraging Lucas to be true to himself, and there’s the obligatory understanding ex-girlfriend because apparently every gay coming-out story requires one sympathetic woman to validate the protagonist’s journey. It’s the formula, darling, and the movie follows it with the devotion of a monk copying scripture.
But here’s where Plainclothes truly distinguishes itself: it’s not content to be merely predictable. No, Carmen Emmi has decided that what this tired story really needs is to be filmed like someone’s drunk uncle discovered a camcorder at a yard sale. The entire movie is shot in a deliberately amateurish “hand-held VHS” style because nothing says “serious cinema” like making your audience nauseous.
Scenes jump from past to present with the narrative coherence of a fever dream, because linear storytelling is for plebeians who enjoy understanding what they’re watching. Then there are the interminable shots of people staring moodily at the camera. It’s avant-garde! It’s artistic! It’s borderline unwatchable.
Strip away these gimmicks and what remains is a by-the-numbers coming-out story that grows more melodramatic and overwrought with each passing minute. One can only assume that a femme gay protagonist wasn’t considered mainstream-friendly enough, so we get yet another story about a straight-acting, masculine man discovering his sexuality because heaven forbid that we challenge audiences with anything actually different.
Plainclothes is a film desperately trying to convince you it’s the first of its kind, the most important, the most daring. In reality, remove the pretentious filmmaking tricks and it would slot in perfectly with the hundreds of indistinguishable films from TLA Releasing’s back catalog. Add the gimmicks back in and you have something worse: a self-important slog that mistakes incomprehensibility for depth and affectation for artistry. Carmen Emmi had a chance to make something genuinely important about a dark chapter in queer history. Instead, he made another coming-out movie and shook the camera a lot. Thrilling indeed.
