Plainclothes
(2025 | USA | 95 minutes | Carmen Emmi)

Set the paranoid Don’t Ask Don’t Tell nineties, Carmen Emmi’s jittery identity thriller imagines a heightened version of Albany, New York, where public restroom cruising was the top priority of a small town police department. So rampant and insidious is the threat of gay men meeting in bathrooms that the city has dedicated an entire unit to eradicating indecent exposures. Whether this reflects an actual historical reality or the perceptions of those living at the time is better left to the viewer to decide.

In this heightened framework, Plainclothes is a cautionary tale of putting a closeted sexy small town twunk on the force’s mall bathroom entrapment duty: Eventually they’re going to take their own bait and extreme Gay Drama will most certainly ensue.

Here, that tension is between Lucas, a tightly-repressed young cop played with nervy intensity by Tom Blyth, and a daddy named Andrew played by Russell Tovey with the softness of a yearning teddy bear. From the moment they lock eyes with each other across a generic food court, they have some kind of instant chemistry. Lucas’s macho facade clearly covers some anxious repressed questioning; Tovey’s cruiser is more empathetically seeking than lewdly horny (although there is plenty of that, for sure). Their unspoken connection and clandestine meet-ups are both tender and sexy. With some sensitive turns by the cast, it all makes for a strongly constructed setup for excavating the tensions of uncomfortable self revelations. Unfortunate, then, that it kind of goes off the rails: it’s one of many movies at this festival where a gay guy completely loses his goddamn mind in the wake of a good one-night stand.

With dead dad issues compounding familial and societal homophobia, a cinematography design that overuses grainy VHS to enhance internal anxieties, and a culminating holiday party that successfully puts The Bear‘s “Seven Fishes” episode to shame in terms of literal pressure cooking (lentil soup is involved), it’s all A Whole Lot, by the end.

Plainclothes played as an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition Program at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It has additional screenings in Park City and Salt Lake City throughout the festival and is also available online for the public (January 30–February 2)