Plainclothes

In Syracuse in 1997, Lucas, a young police officer, is assigned to entrap and arrest gay men in shopping mall bathrooms. He tells nobody that he is gay himself. When something real begins with one of his targets, the assignment becomes impossible to continue. Carmen Emmi wrote and directed his first film. Tom Blyth plays Lucas, Russell Tovey the man he targets. Emmi was born in Syracuse and began the screenplay in 2016; the sting operations behind the story were common in America in the nineties. The formal choice is period video texture: the image sometimes drops to recording quality, and the character's own memory meets the state's practice of keeping records in the same aesthetic. The story sits between romantic drama and thriller, with the fear of being caught working in two senses at once. It played at Sundance in 2025 and took an award for its ensemble. Who it is for: viewers who like period drama and thrillers built on identity. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a comforting resolution; the film does not offer one.