When I think of depictions of anxiety or panic on screen, I think of rapid heartbeats or imaginary walls closing in, for the sake of metaphor. It isn’t often that anxiety looks like a grainy, analog video of our world.
Carmen Emmi makes a compelling case for that frame of reference in Plainclothes, his directorial feature debut. In the film, Lucas Brennan (Tom Blyth) is a closeted police officer living in upstate New York in 1997, part of a unit that targets gay men through undercover solicitation in public restrooms and arrests them for indecent exposure. Lucas struggles with the assignment, fighting the temptation to act on his attractions. His restraint breaks with a new target, Andrew (Russell Tovey). Lucas quickly breaks protocol and initiates an encounter between them, only to lose his nerve and leave the restroom. He gets a second chance when Andrew slips him his number. Rife with uncertainty and curiosity, Lucas and Andrew start secretly seeing each other. While Andrew insists their encounters aren’t permanent, Lucas can’t ignore the feelings of freedom and affirmation, leaving him stuck between his desires and others’ expectations.
That dissonance drives Lucas’s anxiety, and Emmi uses clever directorial choices to communicate how it cripples him. Significant swathes of the film look like closed-circuit television recordings, with all the grit that entails. The distinct style serves multiple purposes. It ground us in the era, after Ellen Degeneres came out as gay on her sitcom and before Will & Grace premiered. Its resemblance to police interrogation footage reflects Lucas’s job realities and is shorthand for criminality, that whatever he is either observing or experiencing is wrong, even illegal. Emmi deploys the style whenever Lucas confronts his attraction to men, his conflicting feelings for Andrew, and his fear that someone will discover his truth. Accompanied by Lucas’s panic attacks, Emmi’s visual language sharply conveys, with few words, the existential and practical risks of being gay in Lucas’s time and place, and his suffocating panic over his sexuality.
Plainclothes’ handling of Lucas’s anxiety bolsters his near-frantic passion for Andrew and vice versa. The film finds him on constant guard, seeing the risk of exposure in nearly every interaction and scenario, from entrapment training exercises with a recruit to testy glances at family, friends, and colleagues who he suspects know about his sexuality. Lucas expends that nervous energy with Andrew as they negotiate their attraction. Lucas’s tentative excitement leads to enthusiastic hunger, which shifts to surprisingly tender intimacy. Emmi enhances the contrast between Lucas’s two worlds by crafting dreamlike scenarios for the couple: gauzy lighting when they first meet in the mall restroom, and crescent-shaped shadows when they sneak away to a movie theater corridor. There is a breathless, dangerous quality to their romance, where it can quickly spin out of control if they aren’t careful.
Of course, they’re not careful. Plainclothes does take time for its narrative thrusts — Lucas’s anxiety about being found out and his increasingly desperate need for Andrew’s affection — to hit their peak. However, when they do in the third act, the results are jaw-dropping in their explosiveness. Emmi pays off his more murky structural choices, specifically the weaving in and out of past and present, and pushes his characters and their emotions to their shocking, perhaps inevitable, but ultimately satisfying extremes. There is an extraordinary and surprising amount of catharsis at the end of Lucas’s journey of self-acceptance. The film doesn’t end anywhere near where he’d prefer, but you can’t help but feel that he is better off than he was at the start, by the nature of the freedom and honesty he achieves.
The empathy and compassion that audiences will feel for Lucas is mainly due to Tom Blyth’s sensational performance. He captures Lucas’s overwhelming anxiety very well, using every inch of his face and body to demonstrate how fear ravages him. He does just as well with Lucas’s yearning, beautifully conveying the serenity and desperation it pulls from him. Blyth has an excellent scene partner in Russell Tovey, who comes full circle after playing a role similar to Blyth’s in 2016’s The Pass. As Andrew, Tovey is a warm, sturdy presence for romantic transference, but also communicates his fears, disappointments, and hesitancies from years of hard-forged experience. It would be easy for Andrew to be little more than a cipher, but Tovey offers much more with his performance. He and Blyth have a surprisingly complex chemistry: sometimes testy, sometimes sweet, but always potent and sexy.
Even though it centers on anxiety, Plainclothes is an exceptionally assured film. Carmen Emmi treats his vulnerable characters and their circumstances with the inventive care they deserve while cracking open the complexities of being closeted in the 90s. The fact that some of those complexities could apply today only reinforces his commanding perspective and ability to balance emotionality and practicality on screen. What’s more exciting than the film itself is knowing that Emmi has only scratched the surface of his filmmaking capabilities and that his next project should be one of the most coveted in the industry.
Plainclothes had its World Premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
Director: Carmen Emmi
Writer: Carmen Emmi
Rated: NR
Runtime: 95m
Even though it centers on anxiety, Plainclothes is an exceptionally assured film. Carmen Emmi treats his vulnerable characters and their circumstances with the inventive care they deserve while cracking open the complexities of being closeted in the 90s.
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GVN Rating
A late-stage millennial lover of most things related to pop culture. Becomes irrationally irritated by Oscar predictions that don’t come true.
