Plainclothes review: Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey shine in poignant drama
Tom Blyth caught my attention as the young Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and he has been choosing interesting indie projects ever since. Plainclothes is no exception!
Set in upstate New York in 1997, the film follows Lucas, a closeted undercover cop who lures homosexual men into a shopping mall bathroom and arrests them for indecent exposure. He doesn’t follow the typical process when he meets Andrew (Russell Tovey) and instantly feels a connection. Lucas becomes infatuated with Andrew and wants to pursue a relationship, while Andrew wants that part of his life to remain hidden.
Carmen Emmi‘s directorial debut tells a gripping story that slowly reveals major details about these lead characters in a clever way. Emmi uses interesting visual techniques (including camcorder footage), sound design and choppy editing to illustrate Lucas’s spiralling mental health. His secret is eating him up inside and his anxiety makes him believe that everyone already knows.
Blyth does a brilliant job in charting his character’s mental health decline. He is not coping with the shame of his big secret and latches onto Andrew, thinking he’ll show him the way. Tovey’s Andrew is mysterious and in control and clearly very experienced at meeting men secretly. He wants his encounters to be only physical for his safety and self-preservation. We learn more about him later in a fantastic reveal scene. I also have to mention the incredible Maria Dizzia and Amy Forysth, who give such beautiful performances as Lucas’s mum and ex-partner.
As much as I loved the story, there were a few things holding me back from embracing the film. The story hops back and forth in time and I struggled to get the chronology of events right in my head. The editing is very hectic and there’s perhaps too much going on visually. Also, there are a couple of instances where the audio from an important conversation plays over the video of another scene and I couldn’t process all of it.
Plainclothes tells a brilliant story with superb performances, but the visual choices and editing stop it from truly shining.
In cinemas from Friday 10th October