The tense drama also features “Looking” alum Russell Tovey and “The Gilded Age” star Amy Forsyth.

Tom Blyth’s undercover cop embarks on dangerous affair with a man he targets for being gay in *Plainclothes *trailer

The tense drama also features "Looking" alum Russell Tovey and "The Gilded Age" star Amy Forsyth.

By Ryan Coleman

Published on August 12, 2025 12:00PM EDT

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'Plainclothes' stars Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey. Credit:

Ethan Palmer/Courtesy of Sundance Institute

"You can always tell when a man is hiding something."

Gabe Fazio speaks these words midway into the first full trailer for *Plainclothes*, a simmering new drama starring Tom Blyth. Blyth stars as a tense, cagey undercover cop on the entrapment beat. He posts up at shopping malls, lures men who catch his eye into a bathroom, and entreats them just up the edge of some risqué fun before — boom — he alerts the squad team standing nearby to descend on his almost lovers.

"We have a rule on this detail — no words, and no entering the stall," Blyth's commander warns him. But maybe there's a reason Blyth never struggles to pick gay men out of the crowd. Before long, Blyth ends up in a stall with a dashing Russell Tovey, throwing his life into utter chaos.**

Blyth's Lucas is pelted with invasive questions like, "What's your type? Who are you into?" Family and friends (maybe) mean well, but suspicions abound, with some sensing the storm gathering inside the young officer.

Though Lucas insists, "I don't really have a type," Tovey's Andrew breaks down his defenses without effort. "Can I touch you?" he asks a stone-faced Lucas in one scene. "Blink once for no, twice for yes." Nervous, fidgeting, Lucas manages two quick blinks.

The first trailer for *Plainclothes*, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, promises searing thrills, but teases that catharsis isn't out of the question for Lucas, who declares at its end, "I can't hide anymore."**

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*Plainclothes *takes viewers back to the 1990s in Syracuse, N.Y., the hometown of its director, Carmen Emmi. The film won Emmi Sundance's U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast based on the strength of the performances he got out of Blyth, Tovey, Fazio, Amy Forsyth, Christian Cooke, and Maria Dizzia.

The official logline for *Plainclothes *reads: "At his mother's New Year's Eve party Lucas, a young police officer, loses a letter no one was ever meant to read. Amid the backdrop of the suffocating family party, the search for the letter unlocks memories of a past he's tried to forget: months earlier, while working undercover in a mall bathroom, Lucas arrested men by seducing them. But when he encounters Andrew, everything changes. What begins as another setup becomes something far more electric and intimate. As their secret connection deepens and police pressure to deliver arrests intensifies, Lucas finds himself torn between duty and desire. With time running out and his past closing in, *Plainclothes* builds toward a New Year's Eve reckoning where everything he's buried threatens to erupt."

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Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey embark on a dangerous affair in 'Plainclothes'.

Magnolia Pictures

Speaking about the inspiration behind his first directorial feature, Emmi told Sundance in June, "My hometown. My family, especially my brother, who was becoming a police officer while I wrote the script. But also while researching this story, I read somewhere that at a certain age (maybe 12 to 13 years old), boys are taught that a punch is better than a hug. That sentiment stuck with me and really helped me form the question I set out to ask: What happens when you police your feelings?"**

*Plainclothes *releases in theaters September 19, 2025******

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Source: “AOL Movies”