“Its power lies in its refusal to domesticate its contradictions, allowing the political, ethical, and emotional tensions to coexist without hierarchy.”
Being in the closet in the 1990s was not merely a private condition but a constant state of danger, one that became even more suffocating when reinforced by authority, violence, and a rigid sense of duty. Carmen Emmi’s debut feature Plainclothes understands this. Set in working-class New York, the film follows Lucas, an undercover police officer assigned to entrap and arrest gay men cruising for sex. Early on, the operation is framed as a procedural routine, a job defined by repetition and anonymity. Yet when Lucas crosses paths with Andrew, one of his targets, the assignment begins to fracture under the weight of something neither man is equipped to safely identify. It is a premise that could easily settle into the mechanics of a conventional thriller, yet Emmi is far less interested in suspense as an external engine than in the slow erosion of interior boundaries.
Emmi has bigger ambitions with this film; what he proposes is not a narrative driven by pursuit or exposure, but an excavation of the self under sustained pressure. Plainclothes gradually sheds the surface logic of genre; it moves toward something more unsettled and intimate, a study of repression, desire, doubt, and the exhausting vigilance required to survive in spaces where being yourself carries damaging consequences. The danger that defines the film is not limited to arrest or public disgrace but extends to the destabilizing possibility of self-recognition itself. By situating the characters within an atmosphere of constant threat, the film puts us in a risky territory where every interaction is shadowed by actions repeatedly failing to keep pace with the protagonists’ inner needs.
This tension finds its most complicated expression in the relationship between Lucas and Andrew. Their connection begins as a function of the job, structured by deceit and asymmetrical power, yet it slowly mutates into something fragile and increasingly uncontainable. Both men move through the relationship cautiously, shaped by fear and a deep awareness of risk, but their desires persist despite the constraints imposed on them. Their rendezvous take place in isolated, often hidden locations, spaces that allow for temporary suspension from the outside world but never offer true safety. Andrew remains guarded, clear-eyed about the limits of what they can afford to risk, while Lucas becomes increasingly reckless in his attachment. What develops between them is not a romantic escape but a tense negotiation between longing and self-preservation, one that exposes how intimacy, under such conditions, is always tethered to danger.
As the relationship deepens, Lucas’s internal fracture begins to surface more visibly across the film. His professional demeanor grows crisp, punctured by moments of anger and contempt that suggest his ability to compartmentalize is eroding. At home, he withdraws further, tightening the obscuring around his personal life in an effort to counterbalance the loss of control elsewhere. His desire to keep Andrew close, even when Andrew insists on the fragility and impermanence of their connection, becomes a way of grasping at something real, something that briefly allows him to feel aligned with himself. Rather than presenting this as a redemptive awakening, Emmi frames it as an accumulation of pressure, where each attempt at closeness sharpens the contradictions Lucas is already struggling to contain.
On paper, Plainclothes resembles a tightly wound thriller, one in which every encounter carries the potential for exposure or collapse. On screen, however, the film deliberately resists the clean forward momentum such a framework would suggest. Emmi’s direction leans heavily into fervent, often fragmented editing that can initially feel overwhelming, even disorienting. At times, it becomes difficult to orient oneself within the film’s trajectory, and the stylistic intrusions can register as excessive or self-conscious, as though announcing the arrival of a filmmaker eager to assert his ambition.
Later in the film these choices begin to recalibrate their purpose. What once appeared rhetorical reveals itself as an extension of Lucas’s fractured interior life. The restless editing, the abrupt shifts in rhythm, and the refusal of visual stability begin to mirror a psyche caught between instinct and denial. This lack of clarity mirrors a life lived in fragments of fear, desire, and self-control, all of them colliding faster than reason can intervene. By then, every formal strategy, initially suspect, grows inseparable from the film’s emotional logic; to carry what dialogue leaves unresolved.
This is where Plainclothes asserts itself as a character study rather than a genre exercise. Carmen Emmi places his trust not in exposition but in gesture, image, and rhythm, allowing the film’s unease to accumulate rather than resolve. His commitment to anxious, immersive storytelling is a risk, particularly for a debut, but one that ultimately feels purposeful. The film does not seek to soothe its tensions or clarify its moral ambiguities; instead, it allows them to remain active and unresolved.
Such an approach would falter without a performance capable of sustaining its emotional density, and Tom Blyth delivers one marked by remarkable restraint. His portrayal of Lucas avoids overt signaling, relying instead on subtle shifts in posture, gaze, and physical tension. Blyth communicates a constant negotiation between duty, fear, and desire, allowing vulnerability to appear without ever tipping into melodrama. Even as Lucas makes decisions that carry serious ethical significance, choices the film neither endorses nor excuses, Blyth maintains a fragile clarity that keeps the character legible without making him sympathetic by default.
In the hands of a promising director, and through Blyth’s performance, Plainclothes becomes less concerned with the mechanics of entrapment than with the cost of living in sustained division. It is an uneasy, sometimes abrasive film, one that refuses narrative comfort or emotional release. Its power lies in its refusal to domesticate its contradictions, allowing the political, ethical, and emotional tensions to coexist without hierarchy. By the end, the film lingers not because it offers resolution, but because it leaves its fractures exposed, insisting that some forms of harm cannot be neatly contained.