Harry Styles is becoming a force to be reckoned with on the big screen. He has made a starry cameo role in Marvel Studios’ epic Eternals, and that was after his breakout role in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Finally this year we have been treated to Don’t Worry Darling and the recently released My Policeman, both of which have pushed the musician’s talent as an actor to weird and unusual levels. There is a common theme around his roles in his recent films and that is his sex appeal. Harry Styles clearly has the looks of a leading man and is considered a heartthrob across the world. With My Policeman, he now explores a different side to his sexuality by playing a closeted gay Policeman, hence the title.
Styles plays Tom who falls in love with and marries a schoolteacher called Marion, played by Emma Corrin who played a young Princess Diana in The Crown. Both actors have a clear and present chemistry, but it is when Tom meets Patrick, a museum curator, where their chemistry and love is tested with a simmering passion brewing between Patrick and Tom over time. Meanwhile the film constantly shifts to present day where Tom and Patrick have a strained relationship while Marion looks after Patrick who appears to have suffered from a stroke. How exactly Tom and Patrick’s relationship broke and how they became distanced is what the film explores, from the 1950s to the present day.
The romance and the passion is very much heated and that is the main draw of the film. My Policeman treats the relationship between Tom and Patrick as sexually charged as possible which a lot of films based on gay couples seem to step away from. The scenes set in the present day do detract from these heated exchanges as young men and you do wish you could explore more of their burgeoning desires during these past scenes. It does tread some generic ground as well with Marion discovering their affair and not confronting or dealing with the situation in a rational way, even though back in the 1950s it was considered wrong to be in a same-sex relationship, but you do root for Patrick and Tom to stay together despite their pre-determined future in the modern day scenes.
It’s not just about the romance, the film also shows what life in Brighton was like in the 1950s. The irony the film explores is just how many people of that era were hiding their homosexual relationships in a city now best described as the LGBTQ+ capital of England. This was a different time, and the yellows and oranges of 1950s Brighton do transport you back in time. It has a very nostalgic tone but it feels very dialled back. You do wish we could explore more of the people surrounded by Tom and Patrick, but sadly the focus on Tom and Patrick is dragged out for the majority of the runtime to the point where most of their encounters feel a little formulaic and repeated. As good as Harry Styles and David Dawson are as Tom and Patrick, the script does sadly let them down.
★★☆☆☆
2/5
My Policeman is an interesting film that explores a different side to a homosexual relationship by balancing the yearning of their younger selves to the regretful and reflective versions of themselves in the future. The script does make the story feeling dragged along and the it doesn’t even show how their relationships affected their friends and family apart from Tom’s wife Marion, who becomes a mediative carer between the two of them in their later years. It’s a shame as it promised a heart-warming story and yet it ends up becoming another generic look at homosexuality within a period setting. Other films have done it better.
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Alex Murray, the Head of Eyesight Productions
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