The Film ‘Plainclothes’ Arouses In All Kinds of Ways

February 10, 2026
HANK ORSO

The queer indie hit of 2025, Plainclothes, opened last September and recently started streaming on MUBI, as well as Amazon Prime, and Apple TV. Yer boy Hank here cannot emphasize enough how great this film is. Starring Tom Blyth (Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songs and Snakes) and Russell Tovey (Looking, American Horror Story: NYC, Angels In America), and written/directed by Carmen Emmi, the film premiered at Sundance last year, where it won the Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast.

This review contains mild spoilers.

Blyth plays a young police officer in a small northeast town (it was filmed in Syracuse, NY) who is the lead in a sting operation netting men who meet in public areas for sex. Mainly, a local mall. When he comes across closet-case Tovey, something clicks in him, and he feels a need to step away from his assignment. The first time he meets Tovey, in a bathroom, ready to bust him, Tovey's Andrew is bested by, of all things, a stuck zipper, allowing him to back away regretfully, and thereby not commit a crime. On the way out, he slyly slips Blyth his number. Thus begins an emotionally gruelling and one-sided love affair, for Blyth's Lucas, which burns oh so brightly. And you know what they say about love that burns too fast.

The film takes place in the 90s, so there is emphasis placed on the stress of remaining fixed in the closet, while aspiring to express any kind of emotion and desire. The older Andrew is experienced with how to play the game, with a family at home, while he gets casual and anonymous sex from men elsewhere. Lucas, on the other hand, is fresh from a breakup with his girlfriend. You learn from a conversation that this couple, before their split, had already had some kind of discussion about his same-sex attractions. And in a later scene, when she tells him, "You have these feelings. And it's okay to have these feelings," she is disarmingly supportive, which gives him encouragement.

Tovey plays Andrew with a smoldering control that keeps Lucas at an emotional arm's length, but he's not a closeted asshole, evil gay. When Lucas expresses a desire to see him after their incredibly hot flip-fuck in a van by a greenhouse, Andrews's often-used location for illicit assignations, he gently but firmly tells Lucas, "That isn't how this works." He informs Lucas at the outset that he never sees a guy more than once. He's honest, but that honesty can hurt, especially when received by an impressionable young 'mo who's really just learning about how to navigate the world as his true self. As a cop, he was always in control. Now he's losing control as he's flung far from his comfort zone, unmoored in his new desires and needs.

Throw in some plot points surrounding Lucas's loving mother and his recently deceased father, the contents of a missing letter, and his homophobic, erratic uncle, and it all comes to a head in an explosion of violence and surprising hope.

Is there sex? Oh yes. Their sex scene, carefully choreographed with the help of an intimacy coordinator, might only show them mostly from the waist up, but the tight camera work and editing might, like the shower scene in Psycho, lead you to believe you're seeing more than you are. You don't need to see it all. Tovey and Blyth, both fine English actors, will have you thinking you're watching the PG-13 version of one of their OnlyFans scenes.

But what is so painfully heartbreaking is that you're given enough information from these two that Lucas thinks this is the beginning of something fresh and scary and wonderful, while Andrew knows this is a one-time thing. But because Tovey is so gifted at expressing a range of emotions across his handsome face, you also know that, for Andrew, this isn't easy. He knows the pain and loss that comes with such an existence, of sneaking around, of lying to your family and to yourself, but as he tells Lucas later in the film, the pain doesn't stay around as long after each time.

What's great about Emmi's direction and camerawork is how intimate he lets his camera be when framing his stars. There are so many close-ups of faces, mouths, hands, fingers. He frames them in mirrors, watching others, in doorframes, in ornate theater columns, as if there's not enough room for them and they are constantly pressed together. Which is exactly where these characters long to be.

And Emmi has done his homework. In a scene where the cops are working through the details of using a two-way mirror and some new video equipment in the bathroom to bust their victims, he actually mimics historical footage of the 1962 Mansfield, OH police investigation into tearoom cruising in an underground bathoom in their town square park My partner and I, having een that original footage elsewhere, both immediately guffawed with recognition.

It should be noted that, for all of the emotional tension, the homophobia inherent in many of the characters, and of the time, the plotline of targeting gay men, which is so contemporary, given things like NYC's targeting of gay cruisers in Penn Station last summer, that this isn't all doom and gloom. While Andrew remains firmly and stoically in his closet, Lucas, by the end, is set on a path of renewal and hope. There is pain, yes, but you know that for Lucas, after the credits roll, there is a gorgeous new life he is preparing himself to dive into. The closet is Andrew's choice, but it doesn't have to be Lucas's.