It’s the final seconds of 1994. A cramped, suffocating New Year’s Eve party in Syracuse. While everyone else is counting down to midnight, a young man named Lucas is tearing through the house, hunting for a letter.

Not just any letter. A secret. A confession. A piece of his soul he never meant for anyone to find.

That desperate search—and the tidal wave of memories it unleashes—is the heart of PLAINCLOTHES, one of the most electrifying, emotionally devastating films to premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

This isn’t your typical period thriller. Writer-director Carmen Emmi has crafted something far more personal: a excavation of a past many would rather forget, wrapped inside a high-stakes romance that dares to flourish in the shadows of oppression.

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The setup is brutal. Lucas (a stunning, star-making turn from Tom Blyth, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) is a promising young cop in 1990s Syracuse. His assignment? Go undercover in mall bathrooms and public parks. Seduce gay men. Entrap them. Arrest them.

It’s cold, clinical, dehumanizing work—until the day he meets Andrew.

Andrew (the effortlessly magnetic Russell Tovey, Looking, Feud) walks in, and the air changes. What was supposed to be another routine sting spirals into something real, raw, and dangerously intimate. Soon, Lucas is trapped between two impossible forces: the badge he swore to uphold, and a desire so powerful it could shatter his entire life.

“The idea that sting operations like this still existed haunted me,” Emmi writes, recalling the 2014 Long Beach case that sparked the story. “It forced me to confront why I had closeted myself for so long.”

A Love Letter to a Hometown—and to the Self He Left Behind

Emmi grew up in Syracuse. And he shot Plainclothes in the actual places that shaped him: his childhood mall, the Landmark Theatre, the greenhouses where his grandfather taught him to pot flowers. The city isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a suffocating character, mirroring the 90s’ crushing expectations of masculinity.

“I remembered deepening my voice. Lying about my favorite music and movies to seem more ‘masculine’—more ‘straight,’” Emmi says. “I realized I’d been policing my own feelings, becoming my harshest enforcer.”

That inner war is visualized brilliantly throughout the film. Emmi and editor Erik Vogt-Nilsen weave in gritty Hi8 footage—shot on the exact camera Emmi used as a kid. Those grainy, nostalgic glimpses become Lucas’s fractured inner monologue: what he sees, and what he’s terrified is true.

Chemistry That Burns

Blyth and Tovey don’t just act this romance—they live it. Blyth radiates coiled-spring anxiety, a man ready to snap. Tovey brings grounded warmth and heartbreaking vulnerability. Together, they make you root for a love that feels utterly impossible.

The cast also includes Maria Dizzia (Orange Is the New Black) and Amy Forsyth (CODA), each representing broken pieces of Lucas’s world. Emmi made this film for his seven-year-old self. “So that he could exhale.” He made it for everyone who’s ever hidden a part of themselves just to survive.

He recalls a moment that stuck with him: “a kid in the grocery line, watching their mom turn over a magazine to hide the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. That kid can’t watch this movie yet. But they can watch me turn the magazine back around.”

Plainclothes is that act of turning it back. Suspenseful, romantic, and achingly human, it doesn’t just tell a story—it demands you feel every second of it.

PLAINCLOTHES, written and directed by Carmen Emmi, premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

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