Harry Styles is one of our greatest artists. I’ll say it. And while I love his music career, I also love movie star Harry Styles, which makes the teaser trailer for My Policeman an exciting thing for me. Styles is bringing us a queer story of a man named Tom. He’s a closeted police officer who is torn between his duty and the love he feels for an arts curator named Patrick (David Dawson) in the 1950s U.K., all tied into his relationship with Marion (Emma Corrin), who he marries, while still secretly dating Patrick.
Written by Ron Nyswaner and adapted from Bethan Roberts’ 2012 romance novel of the same name, the film is split between their time as a young trio in love and struggling to understand their relationships in the 1950s, and their time in the 1990s when they’re 40 years older, and both Tom (played by Linus Roache) and Marion (now played by Gina McKee) take in Patrick (Rupert Everett) after he suffers from a stroke, according to IndieWire.
The official trailer
The official trailer for the movie shows us a forbidden love and the struggle that the three face in the knowledge that both Tom and Patrick had to go through and what Marion is willing to open up about. Set to the Cat Power song “Sea of Love,” the trailer takes us on the budding romance between Marion and Tom that leads into Tom’s love for Patrick and Marion’s acknowledgement that she knew about Patrick’s connection to their marriage.
It sets the tone for the heartbreak that these two men will have to go through in order to embrace one another in the way they want to and love each other. And separating their story into the two different time periods is going to be a fascinating look at the relationships between all three characters.
The previous teaser trailer
The teaser trailer only shows us their time in the 50s together, but it is clearly a look at a charming Styles coming to terms with his relationships and trying to understand his feelings in the midst of knowing that it was illegal—and, as a result, incredibly risky—to embrace his love for Patrick. (Homosexual sex acts were decriminalized for men in the U.K. by 1967, but in the decades prior, they were severely persecuted by the law.)
In a piece for Vanity Fair, director Michael Grandage explained Tom and his decisions: “It’s made more problematic by the fact that he’s a policeman, and he’s in a career that is about upholding the law. And the law in the country at the time is about everything he feels — the complexity of it is something that whoever was going to play younger Tom and older Tom needed to somehow understand and absorb.”
But it makes sense that it is Harry Styles to lead this charge. Given what little we know about the film, it is easy to see how both Marion and Patrick would be in love with him. “This story is about two people that are in love with Tom, slightly obsessed with him,” producer Robbie Rogers said. “Harry — the world is so transfixed on him, on his every move.”
It is a fascinating look into love and history, and getting to see Harry Styles play a role like Tom right after we get to see him next in Don’t Worry Darling is going to show us all just how talented of an actor he is. Pair that with the amazing talent that is Emma Corrin and David Dawson, and this is one movie I don’t want to miss! My Policeman hits theaters on October 21 and is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video on November 4.
(featured image: Prime Video)
