By Adam Bloodworth
My Policeman review: Harry Styles is not yet a good actor, but Styles gives the fans exactly what they want in this gripping LGBTQ drama
Amid all the rumours of a feud between Harry Styles, his director-girlfriend Olivia Wilde and their co-star Florence Pugh on the set of Don’t Worry Darling – a rumour that grew stronger when Pugh didn’t turn up to press conferences – you’d have been forgiven for forgetting Styles has another flick out.
Not just any flick: one where he gets his naked butt out and, clearly having engaged with an oh-so modern intimacy coordinator, has some of the most authentic and goddamn steamy hot sex that’s ever been filmed by one lucky camera. In short, My Policeman delivers exactly what 99.999999% of My Policeman ticketholders will book for: to see the man no person could convincingly argue doesn’t possess godlike beauty, naked, multiple times, flashing some nipple, some midriff and some occasional buttock.
Thankfully, legendary director Michael Grandage of Genius and What The Butler Saw lends a stylish hand. For instance, he has a tendency to create lingering shots of body parts (no, not those body parts – get your mind out of the gutter) like hands, mouths and closed eyes, and not just in sex scenes, which cleverly tie together narrative threads and point to a broader talent for capturing the senses on the big screen. Such thoughtful camerawork, delivered through a buoyant story with plenty of gripping parts, upscales My Policeman from “look there’s the One Direction guy naked!” to credible arty film with One Direction man in.
In My Policeman, where he plays a gay man, and outside of this film, Styles has become an arbiter for progress. He went to the Met Gala wearing a dress and waves trans flags at his gigs. He is clearly a talented human rights activist and a blazing symbol of a 21st century masculine pin-up. Not just unbeholden to toxic ideals about what men should look or act like but actively ripping those ideas up, and as a presumably straight man, too, he is to be admired. But he is not yet a good actor.
Styles rarely says more than seven or eight words in a stretch during My Policeman, and in tenser moments of action, he struggles to come off as naturalistic. But he is more than a pretty face: you get the impression from his schtick that representing underrepresented voices in his work, like this film, genuinely matters to him, and he is best in the intimate scenes; he can cast a lingering eye, and has more of a feel for how to act in a physical scene with movement than anything more static. It helps that he plays a policeman called Tom in the 1950s and so Grandage lends his throwback scenes a historical quality; he wears heavy makeup and his character isn’t expected to do much more than pout like male leads from the era did.
Propping him up in this adaptation of Bethan Roberts’s novel, loosely inspired by the life of E.M. Forster, are The Crown’s Emma Corrin, who is gently stirring as Tom’s female love interest Marion, David Dawson as his lover Patrick as well as an older cast playing the crew in the 1990s, led studiously by Rupert Everett, who is touching in a career high role which delivers a lingering portrait of old age and misery.
It might not be in the line up for awards, but it comes off as a well-rounded feature, and makes an emotional case for the hardships of the lives of those battered by the injustices of the mid century. The plot isn’t entirely superfluous, but let’s face it, we’re here for Harry, and there’s enough hot sex scattered throughout to keep everyone happy. Or in need of a cold shower.
My Policeman is in cinemas from 21 October and on Amazon Prime from 4 November
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