It’s time to take a step away from the drama of Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling and remember there’s another Harry Styles film on the way: Michael Grandage’s My Policeman. In the full trailer, we see Styles fruitlessly create some chemistry with his fellow co-stars in a film all about love, desire, and longing. For a film that boasts inspiration from Hiroshima Mon Amour, there’s very little spark between the singer-turned-actor and his co-leads, at least in this trailer.
Styles stars in My Policeman as Tom, a police officer who finds himself caught in a love triangle with his wife, schoolteacher Marion (Emma Corrin), and museum curator Patrick (David Dawson) in 1950s Britain. Styles’ character goes on about the deep feelings of love and the sanctity of marriage while trying to keep his feelings about Patrick hidden and uphold the law against homosexuality.
We later meet the three in the ‘90s, as Tom and Marion take in Patrick after he suffers from a stroke. The older versions of the characters are played by Linus Roache, Gina McKee, and Rupert Everett.
When Styles isn’t sharing rambling points of view on acting, he’s caught within the trappings of his own tepid takes on gay sexuality, showing just how much he does not know about gay films—and it shows in the trailer for My Policeman.
“So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” Styles recently said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.”
Styles continued, “It’s obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be gay. That was illegal.’ I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it. It’s not like ‘This is a gay story about these guys being gay.’ It’s about love and about wasted time to me.”
My Policeman premieres in theaters October 21 before streaming on Amazon Prime Video November 4.