NZIFF 2025 Craccum Coverage | Plainclothes

Review by Heather Hills

Carmen Emmi’s stunning directorial debut opens a door to a world once forced into the shadows of public bathroom stalls and hidden backrooms, a world that was shaped by secrecy, shame, fleeting connection and constant desire. 

Plainclothes follows the story of Lucas (played by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes actor, Tom Blyth), a young police officer, whose detail is running a sting operation, luring in and arresting gay men cruising for sex at malls in central New York. However, things take a turn when he meets Andrew (played by charismatic Russel Tovey), who, after a tense, sexually charged encounter in the infamous mall bathrooms, slips him his phone number when Lucas fails to implicate him. This meeting sparks the beginning of Lucas’s fragmentation of consciousness and crisis of sexuality and identity. 

From that moment on, we are pulled into an intense, short-lived affair clouded by secrecy, longing, and fear. Initially, I questioned how the film would fit into the thriller genre, having expected a forbidden love-type drama. But Plainclothes delivers; its tension is both emotional and visceral. Emmi offers a glimpse into the immense difficulty of merely existing as a gay man in the late 20th century, where danger was constant and intimacy rarely came without risk. 

We experience this thrill through Lucas’s inner conflict, his desire, anxiety, nostalgia and paranoia, conveyed through the lo-fi texture of VHS. The imagery is grainy, skittish and raw, capturing both his psychological turmoil and distinctive aesthetic of the 90s. This multimedia approach effectively immerses viewers in Lucas’s fragmented experience, allowing us to feel his self-disorientation and emotional volatility. However, at times, the layered techniques, jumping timelines, contorted sounds and harsh, flashing lights overwhelm rather than support the film’s emotional effect. 

The film concludes with a searing climax. A release of utter rage, heartbreak, exhaustion and poignant emotion that leaves one with paradoxical feelings of hope and sadness. Through his heartfelt tribute to the secret lives of gay men, Emmi captures what I can only imagine was the quiet yet intense and urgent ache of the queer experience in the 1990s.