Plainclothes

Director: Carmen Emmi, 95 min, USA/U.K.

In Carmen Emmi’s ’90s-set erotic drama, Tom Blyth plays a closeted undercover cop tasked with entrapping men cruising in shopping mall bathrooms. But when he crosses paths with a married man (Russell Tovey), a routine sting spirals into something far more complicated. A charged encounter ignites a dangerous attraction, turning the operation into a volatile dance of secrecy and desire, where the lines between duty and longing, watcher and watched, begin to blur. Raised in the shadow of his grandfather’s badge and working within a deeply homophobic police department, Lucas begins to unravel under the weight of conflicted loyalties and repressed identity.