Recensioni di Metacritic

Consequences, choices, love, identity, and paranoia are all at the center of this mesmerizing thriller.

What truly elevates Plainclothes in this genre are the contributions from Tovey and Blyth.

A darker take on coming out, Plainclothes has a few familiar twists but ultimately succeeds through its performances and take on the material.

First-time writer-director Carmen Emmi’s aesthetically overworked use of low-grade video and distorted sound is intrusive, but very fine performances from Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey keep you glued to this sexy, sad, authentically gritty drama.

Plainclothes builds to an intense and ultimately cathartic climax, but there’s something retrograde about the shame Lucas feels. Emmi wants us to experience his protagonist’s sense of suffocation, when looking back from the present, we just want to shout: “It gets better!”

Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.

Even without the editing problems, it’s not clear that the narrative bones of Plainclothes were ever strong enough for the movie to work. The entire film often resembles a jumble of queer cinema archetypes executed better on many other occasions.

While parts of it are laudable, unfortunately, Emmi’s film feels underbaked, never truly elevating its story to generate the kind of deeper effect that similar thrillers have managed to elicit.