TIFF 2022: My Policeman Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

So Harry Styles is an actor now whether we like it or not. The second of his two major releases in 2022, following Don’t Worry Darling, My Policeman looks to aim even higher but is likely to have a mixed reception amongst audiences. Fans of Styles supporting the film feels like a given but this overly-melodramatic period romance won’t hit the right notes with everyone. Based on the book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, it is almost certainly not going to resonate with everyone as the subject matter can come off as dull in spite of a decent cast including Styles. Perhaps lacking the range to create a character worth investing in on a deeper emotional level, his charisma does just enough to help him get by while great turns from Emma Corrin and David Dawson help round out the lead trio. A multi-generational tale saw Gina McKee, Linus Roache, and Rupert Everett all shine as the former three’s older counterparts in what was a character study told through the lens of time.

My Policeman follows Tom (Styles), a young and tightly-wound police officer trapped under the pressure of the time, conforming to the rules and norms of 1950s Britain. That being said, he still longed for more. Things changed for Tom after meeting a teacher named Marion (Corrin). There was a spark there but their relationship became even more complicated as the two met a museum curator named Patrick (Dawson). All becoming friends, that relationship quickly evolved into a love triangle of sorts. Meanwhile, Tom and Patrick shared a much different relationship as the latter helped Tom explore his sexual identity and a side of himself that he had repressed. Faced with conflicting feelings, Tom found himself at a crossroads between Patrick and Marion which only got worse. Patrick and Marion and their different perspectives also found themselves at a similar crossroads. Leading to an eventual falling out, the film showed them at later stage in their lives (McKee, Roache, and Everett) moving until the weight of their pasts slowly came trickling back. Jumping back in time from the past to the present, each informed the other as the film built towards that fallout. Despite the bleakness of it all, there was still plenty of hope.

The connection of those two timelines wasn’t necessarily seamless as the plot veers a few too many times towards melodrama, distracting from the film’s attempts at depth. Nevertheless, the best part of My Policeman was its performances from its aforementioned cast, watching the contrast between the past and the present. While Corrin and Dawson carry the past, McKee, Roache, and Everett do some interesting things with their incarnations but that lack of connection hurt them and the unearned ending.

At the end of the day, My Policeman will have its audience but is nowhere near a showstopper as it is destined to fizzle out for anyone outside of its target audience.

 still courtesy of Amazon Studios

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.