By Jordan Crucchiola

Before the U.S. Dramatic Competition premiere of Plainclothes on January 27, writer-director Carmen Emmi was beside himself. Not just because he was about to debut a movie at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, but because senior director of programming Kim Yutani made it a point to introduce the film herself. 

“This is such a confidently directed film,” Yutani tells the audience at The Ray Theater. “I remember very distinctly sitting on my couch with my cats, and I started playing this movie and I just sat up straight. I was so mesmerized by the filmmaking, and I was pretty certain that we would be showing this film the moment I finished it. We were incredibly impressed with how this film captures the thrill and anxiety and love that resides within illicit expressions of queerness, and I think this is a really special, textured, sensual, high-intensity ride. I am so passionate about this film, and I am really excited to share it with you.”

Emmi then joins Yutani at the podium to thank his family and his producers and to share how long he has imagined this moment. “I’ve wanted to be here ever since I saw Little Miss Sunshine with [my family] at the mall, so this is really my dream come true,” Emmi tells the premiere crowd. “And it’s the biggest honor — well, it’s now the second biggest honor, because when Kim told me on Wednesday that she would be introducing me, I had to excuse myself from the conversation, because I started crying.”

The first-time feature filmmaker says that everything he wanted to convey with Plainclothes made it to the screen and that he truly got to make the movie he had envisioned. The story is set in upstate New York in 1997, where a young police officer named Lucas (Tom Blythe) is working undercover to entice gay men into illicit interactions. Lucas lures them into a bathroom with the aim of getting them to expose themselves so that another officer can tag in and make the arrest. 

Lucas seems ill at ease in his role when we meet him in Plainclothes, and when he finds himself drawn to a handsome stranger named Andrew (Russell Tovey) as a mark at the food court he trawls, Lucas starts to unravel under the pressure of keeping his true self a secret. The two men begin seeing each other in private spaces — a back room in a movie theater, a greenhouse far from the view of prying eyes. Andrew allows Lucas to move closer at his own pace, and the desirous tension between the two of them builds to an intolerable level before Lucas finally releases his inhibitions under the cover of night. The yearning before and after the affair rivals the intensity of Lucas and Andrew’s physical connection.

Emmi’s debut wraps its arms around the viewer and squeezes their chests. Lucas doesn’t feel safe disclosing the truth to his family, his job, or almost anyone else in his community, reminding us all that stigmatization in the wake of the AIDS epidemic and the panic of “gay cancer” is still a painfully close history. Even now as we see so many more stories of queer life flourishing onscreen, they are arriving alongside frightening backlash to outward expressions of queerness.

During the post-premiere Q&A, Emmi says his decision to set the film in 1997 came about for two reasons. One of which was, “That was the year my second-favorite movie came out, Titanic,” and the other was because 1997 was the year he first internalized being gay as something to feel shame over. The characters in Plainclothes are, in some ways, an amalgam of the director’s own life experiences, and Emmi recounts for the audience an encounter at a grocery store where he heard a woman talking about Barbra Streisand’s gay son. “I remember the people she was with squirmed. I was little, but I remember thinking ‘gay equals bad.’ And ever since then I feel like I was quieting a part of myself that I wanted to express.” Emmi eventually came out in his early 20s, and several key figures in producing Plainclothes were relationships he made while at University of Southern California.

The film is powered by a contained-explosion performance from Blythe, and even though the actor could not attend the premiere due to filming commitments across the world, Blythe did send a video message that played for the crowd following the screening. “It has been a massive dream of mine for so many years to bring a film to Sundance. The fact that Plainclothes is the film I get to do that with for the first time means the world to me,” Blythe says. “For the audience there, I really believe that you are witnessing the very beginning of an amazing new auteur’s feature film career, and Carmen, I sincerely hope I’m making them with you for years to come. And to Sundance, thank you for championing film. Thank you for championing this film.”