‘Plainclothes’ Review: Russell Tovey And Tom Blyth Smolder In A Story Of Star-Crossed Lovers – Sundance Film Festival

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With gay rights coming back into the crosshairs in almost every country across the globe, Carmen Emmi’s slow-burn drama is sobering reminder of just how far these things have progressed in the past 30 years.

Taking place primarily in 1997 — unfolding in flashback from the framing device of a family New Year’s Eve party being held a few years later — it takes a little while to find its feet.

Once the main players are established, though, and experimental flashes of harsh analog video become a more recognizable manifestation of its ugly-beautiful aesthetic, Plainclothes builds to a very satisfying conclusion, putting a torrid but meaningful gay love affair at the center of a universal coming-of-age story.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart is an unlikely reference point, not because Plainclothes is a genre film — though it shares a tiny bit of DNA with William Friedkin’s much more crudely articulated thriller Cruising — but because it deals with the disjunct between the mind’s needs and the body’s desires.