Writer-director Carmen Emmi, inspired in part by a 2016 L.A. Times article detailing a sting operation by undercover police officers at a popular cruising site in Long Beach, made his debut feature Plainclothes with a specific question in mind: “what happens when you police your feelings?” Set in Syracuse, New York, in 1997, Plainclothes centers on a young undercover officer who entraps gay men in a mall bathroom. This cop is a closeted gay man himself, though, and his life comes unglued when he pursues an extracurricular sexual relationship with one of his intended targets. Plainclothes comes with an intriguing, erotically and emotionally charged premise, but Emmi struggles to follow through on its promise. Lacking in narrative rigor and consistency, and overburdened with excessive aesthetic flourishes, Plainclothes proves to be more frustrating than seductive.
Lucas (Tom Blyth) prowls the mall each day with a couple of colleagues, leading men into the bathroom with subtle signals, then arresting them as soon as they expose themselves. As he explains to a rookie training to potentially take over for Lucas, who by his own admission is becoming too familiar of a face, the men they arrest rarely contest their charges, because to do so would be to expose their identities in a courtroom. Highly competent at this bizarre job of questionable legality, a snap decision suggests how deeply he must have been repressing his own desires at work: having lured an attractive man, Andrew (Russell Tovey), into the bathroom, Lucas nearly proceeds to have sex with him instead of arresting him, but then bolts out the door without doing either.
Andrew leaves Lucas his phone number on his way out, and after Lucas has an emotionally draining few weeks — his ill father dies, and his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Emily (Amy Forsyth) is finally, fully severed — he decides to seek out Andrew’s company again. After a few meetings, which suggest both emotional and sexual chemistry, Lucas is enamored, but Andrew, who is also closeted, tells Lucas he never meets a sexual partner more than a couple times. Lucas is unable to accept this, and he begins to go to great lengths to see Andrew again.
The first, most glaring problem of Plainclothes is the plausibility of the entrapment scheme. Certainly it is plausible that the police use predatory and bigoted tactics, and that they cross legal and ethical lines to make arrests — Emmi, after all, was inspired by a relatively recent sting operation on cruising sites in southern California, and these policing tactics continue to rear their ugly heads throughout the country. Yet the film’s highly organized entrapment operation, which apparently occupies multiple officers full-time, at a lightly trafficked mall bathroom where there doesn’t seem to be much organic cruising occurring, strains narrative logic. An array of questions arises that Emmi barely addresses, if at all. Why has the police department dedicated so many resources to this operation? Why is a single mall bathroom apparently the only location they patrol? Even if its targets almost never contest their charges, wouldn’t anyone have raised concerns about the potential consequences of regularly making legally questionable arrests at a highly public location? With basic practical questions unanswered, the entrapment operation functions solely as an awkward narrative contrivance, too often distracting from the more grounded relationships that form the real substance of the film.
As if to compensate for the film’s narrative gaps, Emmi includes an array of aesthetic and formal techniques. Most prominently, period-specific home video footage is interspersed with the film’s digital photography (shot by Ethan Palmer), and this footage is often deployed in rapid montages between scenes. The film is heavily scored, as well, by Emily Wells with rhythmic, alternately tense and romantic compositions, some of which are also sung, alongside ‘90s pop songs. Rather than generating intensity and aesthetic immersion, though, the overworked style too often draws attention to itself and distracts from the narrative at hand.
Despite some clunky dialogue, the intimate scenes between the central characters, usually Lucas and Andrew, are more successful. Blyth emanates the weight of his characters’ intense repression, and if his performance grows overheated toward the climax, his commitment generally helps to keep the film afloat. Tovey, whose character seems more comfortable with leading a compartmentalized double life, provides an unexpectedly affable — and undoubtedly alluring — counterpoint. Maria Dizzia, as well, provides a much-needed subtlety in her performance as Lucas’ mother Marie. Yet as conflicts develop between the characters, Emmi intensifies them too fervently, and the final act of the film resultantly tilts toward unmodulated melodrama.
Emmi evinces a clear interest in a number of thematically interesting binaries: repression and liberation, authenticity and falseness, policing and acceptance. He also displays a facility with actors — the film won a special prize for ensemble acting at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival — and admirable aesthetic and narrative ambition. Plainclothes, though, has too many visible missteps for these potential attributes to rise to the fore, with its gaps in narrative logic and extraneous stylistic gestures being the most prominent drags on the film. Some might find erotic intrigue and emotional catharsis in Plainclothes, but its clumsy execution precludes the film from reaching its full artistic potential.
DIRECTOR: Carmen Emmi; CAST: Tom Blyth, Russell Tovey, Maria Dizzia; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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