After Patrick (Rupert Everett) suffers a stroke, Marion (Gina McKee) offers to look after him in her home so that he is not alone in a hospital. Her husband, Tom (Linus Roache), is not very keen on the idea as the two men had a severe falling out when they were younger. While under their care, Marion reads through Patrick’s journal which chronicles how he (David Dawson) first met Tom (Harry Styles) and her (Emma Corrin) decades prior, and the twisted, lustful web of lies and deceit that altered the course of these three lives forever. 

Michael Grandage directs My Policeman for Amazon Studios from a script by Ron Nyswaner based on the novel by Bethan Roberts. At 113 minutes, the film runs along two timelines, not dissimilar to Ernesto Contreras’ masterful I Dream in Another Language (2017) which uses dual timelines to both inform and interrogate each other. My Policeman opens in the present day with Patrick under the care of Marion at her and Tom’s beach-front home and then looks back other some 40 years prior to the late 1950s when homosexual relationships were illegal in Great Britain and Tom, Marion, and Patrick still had the excitement of youth about them. It is not a straightforward romance, yet not quite a film strictly about friendship, and in this confusion, it strikes up a strange balance between themes further complicated by a narrative structure that works much better on the page than it does on the screen. 

Opening in the present day, My Policeman begins to lay the foundation for this beguiling love triangle as it holds on the mature cast for the first 20 or so minutes. It is clear there is tension lingering from secrets yet to be revealed, but Everett, McKee, and Roache play their characters with guards so high up that it is hard to begin to establish why any of this is even happening. Coupled with the foggy, grey color palette, and Steven Price’s tinkering, melodramatic score, it is a slow, cold start to what will evolve into an equally repressed and brooding tale that relies on the historic persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals to arrive at any narrative tension. 

After a cumbersome entry, it is a relief to flashback to the sun-soaked beach where a younger Marion meets the charming Tom walking alone through the surf. After the meet cute, the two venture to an art museum where they receive a private tour from Patrick who had met Tom after exchanging contact information when Patrick had reported an accident some time prior. Later, when Tom takes Marion back to Patrick’s flat while the connoisseur is away on business, she notices a sketch of Tom framed over the desk, and the first twinges of deceit and jealousy come to the surface. 

The younger cast gets considerably more to do in this story, but through some character choices, structure, and overall look of the film, it remains quite stale. Styles has to navigate a character who is questioning his sexuality against the social norms and his own occupation, so it is understandable that his position and views will constantly change as he has to discover and hide certain parts of himself depending on who he is with at the time, but Tom is so messily written that there is never a clear path for the burgeoning actor to take and he really struggles here to create a fully realized version of Tom. To be kind, Styles’ own discomfort and unease as an actor can be considered an inspired choice, but it is more of an unholy union between a poor performance and a poor script. Corrin has the misfortune that much of the fight her character to make sense of the situation she finds herself in has been written off to be revealed in exposition delivered by the older Marion. Further, after the discovery of her husband’s affair with Patrick which happens shortly after her wedding night, there is no real sense of urgency or fire beneath her. She is content to say she is dissatisfied, but too meek to do anything about it and what action she does take is saved for the very end.  

After playing its cards so close to its chest, suddenly, the film reveals everything while never allowing for any true tension to build, but instead leaving audiences passively waiting for the inevitable fallout teased by Tom’s discomfort of Patrick’s arrival at their home after the stroke. This disconnect between the two timelines is magnified by the framing device of Patrick’s journal which Marion reads through. As she sits in bed alone one night, the older Marion pages through the aisles of memory seemingly shocked to find confirmation of Tom’s sexual encounters with Patrick, yet as revealed in the flashback scenes, Marion is well aware of this affair. The mishandling of this device is not enough to derail the film by itself, but in conjunction with the poorly thought-out arcs that try to add intrigue and the wildly inconsistent motivations, it just overcomplicates matters and becomes yet another hurdle to cross in trying to invest in this story that seems to be actively pushing away its audience. Marion’s clear homophobia throughout is not welcoming at all, either, and while there is a brief line late in the film where she comments about a gay couple she sees in the shops, it is not enough of a revelation to think that she actually grew as a character in her understanding and tolerance. 

To be kind to the film and call it not a story about Tom and Marion, but one of Tom and Patrick can only excuse so much since the chemistry between the young men is nonexistent, substituting the salacious secret they share for tenderness, warmth, and lust. Across the board, the sexuality of My Policeman is incredibly awkward, even when Tom and Patrick are deep into the throws of their affair and allowed to be their genuine selves, Styles always seems hesitant and unsure even when his character is supposed to be feeling authentically free. It feels a little gross to factor this film down to its sex appeal, but as a romance, that is a core element of its construction, and both in and out of the bedroom, there is zero chemistry between the two young men. 

The one standout here is Dawson, whose performance is sidelined in the edit by Styles’ star power but he still manages to outshine him, as well as everyone else involved, bringing a glimmer of light into this otherwise miserly film. Patrick’s story is far from a happy one, but his is the only character where the gravity of the situation feels realized. He is out – at least, as out as one can be in the 1950s – and his necessary caution should not be mistaken for cowardice. He helps to navigate through this world without ever becoming a white rabbit like device for Tom to blindly follow, and it is his knowledge, and more importantly, his confidence, which makes the younger Patrick the most dynamic and magnetic character out of the bunch. Dawson breathes life into this deflated narrative, and like Patrick, he refuses to be bogged down by the insurmountable sadness around him.   

Notwithstanding the litany of questionable consent issues on display in this film, it is the final sequence that feels the most insidious of all. The older Marion tries to pass off a lifetime of guilt and regret onto her husband who she knew would never be able to love her fully and completely as a husband should love his wife. Her emotional arc has been impossible to follow until extremely late in the film, and after a quick reveal, it is understood that her inviting Patrick back is supposed to be her way of atonement for past transgressions, but again she places the burden of responsibility onto Tom in the same way that she places the blame of her unfulfilled life squarely on Tom’s shoulders, too. The entire melodramatic sequence feels like the film is asking audiences to gawk at the selfish gay man – which, yes, Tom is – who destroyed the perfectly innocent heterosexual damsel’s life, all while hoping that audiences also forget the fact that Marion knew about this affair and did nothing to remove herself from the situation and instead chose to grow in her resentment towards Tom. To accept that wholesale strips Marion of any agency in her own life, and therefore any responsibility for her own misery. The film then doubles down on this canonization of Marion as she rides in her taxi with a smile on her face – feeling empowered, possibly, for the first time in her wasted life – but it feels much more like content as the self-appointed savior to these two, helpless gay men that never would have accepted their own feelings for each other if it were not for her kindly actions (read: manipulation). This is not to excuse Tom’s infidelity or Patrick’s knowing participation in the affair but to frame this tragedy around Marion, who ends the film in such a saintly light, is just downright gross and an insult to the memory of the thousands of LGBTQ+ people who faced persecution, both then and now. 

A cursory comparison to My Policeman would be Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) which also follows a similar story of a marriage in peril when the husband seeks embrace from another man, but the key difference, and the reason why Brokeback Mountain works where My Policeman stumbles, is that it does not try to tell this queer romance through the eyes of the heterosexual wife. Grandage’s work is misguided from the start with a script that is unable to untangle the source material, sowing confusion that permeates through the performances of actors that never feel fully invested in their roles. While Roberts’ novel is not guilty of burying her gays, it would have been preferable at this point to put her characters out of the misery of their homosexual existence but instead, she gets to pat herself on the back for inclusive storytelling that uses the history of LGBTQ+ rights to thinly what feels like clear disgust since it can be easily argued that this story is told through Marion’s perspective. Without Dawson, My Policeman would certainly be an abysmal mess, but the actor carries the film with grace and dexterity despite the script viewing him as the third wheel of the plot. With one eye always on the lookout over his shoulder and the other focused on what he wants to achieve, this finely nuanced performance, which is reminiscent of Alfonso Herrera’s turn as Ignacio de la Torre in David Pablos’ Dance of the 41 (2021), is the anchor for this otherwise sloppy film, and it is a shame that the team at the helm were too preoccupied with a rigid and uncertain Styles to realize that it is Patrick who is the true heart of this story about ill-fated love. What could have been a tender and affecting drama instead is an accusatory wreck, though thankfully, it is quickly forgotten with its grey color palette and uninspired score, and soon to be lost to the streaming algorithm.