Sundance 2025 Review: PLAINCLOTHES, Undercover Cop and Repressed Desire Are Combustible Elements

Somewhere in the bowels of an upstate New York shopping mall circa 1997, the undercover cop, Lucas (Tom Blyth), in writer-director Carmen Emmi’s fascinatingly tense, engrossing character study, Plainclothes, sits quietly at a first-floor dining area, his eyes perpetually scanning the shoppers as move about the mall doing what mall shoppers do.

 

Except Lucas isn’t trying to catch shoplifters in action or intervene in disputes between customers and sales people over the cost of goods and services. He’s there for a specific purpose: to arrest the closeted gay men who use one of the mall’s public bathrooms as a hook-up spot for anonymous sex.

 

Presumably developed through trial-and-error, the rules of engagement are simple: don’t exchange words with the potential offender, only glances; don’t follow him into a stall; wait for him to expose himself; retreat back into the mall; signal the other members of the detail via a head nod. Then and only then will Lucas’s fellow officers swoop in and make an arrest.

 

Under the presumption that most men caught in the bait-and-switch are closeted gay men, some with wives and children, they’re expected to avoid public trials and plead out to minor offenses, avoid jail time, and go back to their lives.

 

For Lucas, working the undercover sting operation every day has left a significant, possibly lasting toll on his psyche. The faces of the men he’s helped to entrap and arrest haunt him. More importantly, the various staged encounters with gay men have forced Lucas to confront his own repressed sexuality and the consequences for his future. He’s likely gay himself, though he’s never been with another man physically or emotionally.

 

Contemplating the reality about his sexual orientation, including the effect it’ll have on his soon-to-be-widowed, conservative-leaning mother, Marie (Maria Dizzia), and their immediate white working-class family adds another layer of stress to an already stressed, fracturing psyche. One uncle in particular, Paul (Gabe Fazio), his mother’s younger, perpetually screwed-up brother, practically poses an existential threat to Lucas: if he’s outed, Paul will be the first to push Lucas from the family home and lead the effort to sever Lucas from his family and friends.

 

Lucas’s internal battle between repression and expression takes a turn toward the latter when he meets Andrew (Russell Tovey), a closeted gay man he almost arrests during one of their sting operations. Intrigued, Andrew slips Lucas his number and after hesitating, Lucas calls him.

 

Their first meeting at a rep house goes awry, but an obvious connection leads to a second, more successful meet-up in an unused greenhouse. An oasis from social pressures and expectations, their discussion eventually veers into the kind of wishful thinking, including a journey to an idyllic Gay Mecca (San Francisco), that’s doomed to failure seconds before it’s even mentioned.

 

Making an impressive feature-length debut as a writer-director, Emmi captures the oppressive, repressive atmosphere of a CIS men only/homophobic club (law enforcement) with a precise, almost obsessive attention to detail, making Lucas’s decision to remain closeted the rational, if probably the worst possible, decision for his mental well-being. Outside the precinct house, Emmi perceptively unpacks the psychological aftermath of Lucas’s first experience with another man: Infatuation becomes obsession, and with the tools of a police department at his disposal, Lucas makes the ethically questionable decision to track down Andrew and confront him about his feelings.

 

It’s there, in what’s likely the final meeting between Lucas and Andrew before their brief relationship ends permanently, that Emmi’s screenplay turns Lucas’s search for personal and sexual identity into a heartbreaking exploration, however, brief, of the real-world costs closeted gay men have experienced over the decades, lives only half-lived or lived incompletely, suffocating under the weight of social expectations, living and ultimately dying in quiet desperation.