‘Plainclothes’ Review: A Dated Riff on ‘Cruising’ Can’t Overcome Its Reliance on Cliches

For an undercover cop in 1997, the art of baiting gay men into propositioning you in public restrooms is a grotesque art form that requires a strict adherence to the rules. You can’t say a word to your targets, relying on eye contact to convince them that your intentions are sexual. You can’t actually step into a bathroom stall, and have to goad them into unzipping while you remain in a public space. And you’re certainly not supposed to take their phone number and proceed to fall in love with them after failing to make an arrest.

Yet that’s exactly what Lucas (Tom Blyth) ends up doing in “Plainclothes,” Carmen Emmi’s directorial debut that revisits the world of undercover cops in the gay community most famously explored in William Friedkin’s “Cruising.” Distracted by family tensions caused by his father’s terminal illness and tortured by his own homosexual urges, he makes a phone call to Andrew (Russell Tovey), a silver fox he attempted to entrap at the mall food court he calls an office. Andrew has no idea what Lucas does for a living, simply thinking that his attempts to pick up cute guys at the mall were a success.

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Both men have a vested interest in keeping their tryst a secret, so they take their time returning each other’s calls and carefully select meeting locations. A rendezvous at a midday film screening gives way to a greenhouse hookup, which eventually leads to sex in a van. Andrew shows Lucas the ropes of gay life in an era of shame, encouraging him to visit the promised land of San Francisco, telling him that AIDS is avoidable if you use protection, and imploring him not to sleep with anyone multiple times in order to protect his own heart.

Blyth, a rising star in Hollywood, gives the role his best effort, and his movie star looks cover a few sins. But he’s best when left to simply brood on his own, and his lack of chemistry with Tovey ensures that the forbidden love on which the entire story rests never fully resonates. And as the film builds toward the inevitable heartbreak and clash with intolerant family members, the emotion needed to carry such heavy subject matter simply isn’t there.

Emmi and cinematographer Ethan Palmer approached the project with some creative intentions, switching between aspect ratios and video formats and employing quick cuts in an attempt to illustrate the way Lucas’ mind switches between anxiety, paranoia, and lust. But the attempts to visualize his feelings seldom work as well in practice as they do in theory, and the rapid editing during some of his anxiety attacks exposes the artificiality of their own effect. The world simply did not need another montage that cuts between hardcore gay sex and a man walking around agonizing about whether he did something wrong. The film lacks either the ambition or the resources — or potentially both — to make any of the stylized sequences truly immersive from a sound, color, and narrative perspective, reducing the editing style to a distraction during a film that was already falling flat.

Even without the editing problems, it’s not clear that the narrative bones of “Plainclothes” were ever strong enough for the movie to work. The entire film often resembles a jumble of queer cinema archetypes executed better on many other occasions. It relies so heavily on tropes that it’s not immediately clear that “Plainclothes” has anything of its own to say. Everything from the homophobic cop being gay himself to a third act twist that will remain unspoiled feels tired, and it’s hard to believe that lines like “Maybe someday you’ll find your San Francisco” were written in the 2020s.

The kind of experimentation that “Plainclothes” attempts only works when the narrative fundamentals are already firmly in place, and Emmi’s film gets too far ahead of itself in that regard. All the aspect ratios in the world can’t overcome the fact that we’re watching two lovers without particularly obvious chemistry stumble through a tired story of love and separation that builds toward an over-the-top conclusion. The late ’90s period piece makes an admirable attempt to bring some of the all-too-recent legal horrors faced by the queer community back into the spotlight, but perhaps this story should have been left in the past.

Grade: C

“Plainclothes” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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