“My Policeman” fails to solve the mystery of its own existence

Somewhere, in a seaside town, an ageing couple invites an older – ailing – friend to convalesce in their home. The invitation is not quite benign. The wife is enthusiastic. The husband is noncommittal. The patient, recovering from a stroke, is irascible and closed-off. Who are these people? Why do they matter to each other? And why should they matter to us? These are questions that Michael Grandage’s “My Policeman” should, realistically, provide answers to. We will get the answer to the first question soon enough, as the film moves into extensive flashbacks to the past. There will be an attempt at answering the second, interrupted by the film’s own airlessness. We are presented with very little in way of an answer to the final question throughout any of the 113 minutes of film, though. In a tale of love and betrayal spanning decades (and sexualities), “My Policeman” feels insipid.

Ron Nyswaner’s screenplay for “My Policeman” chooses to begin this story near the end of things. The husband is Tom, the wife is Marion, and the visitor is Patrick. As Marion tends to Patrick, she muses on the way that he introduced her and her husband to art and the real centre of the film unfolds decades before in 1950s England. The policeman of the film’s title is a young Tom, played by Harry Styles, a dashing lawman with a working-class background. Tom’s courting of Marion, a schoolteacher (Emma Corrin) is initially our focus. Their relationship seems casual, if good-natured, but the intellectual divide between them feels too emphasised. They need a conduit to understand each other. A young Patrick appears as that conduit, at first at least. As played by David Dawson, the young Patrick is a lithe, stylish, and fashionable man. He is well travelled, and well informed. His worldliness fascinates Marion, and even Tom. At first, it seems as if Patrick may interrupt their relationship by courting Marion but early on, the film refocuses to the importance of the title. The policeman is Tom, but the “my” is more complicated. Tom proposes to Marion early on, but he is also engaging in a clandestine relationship with Patrick. Who does this policeman belong to? The story, by way of love-triangle, will seek to solve this.

“My Policeman” is based on Bethan Roberts’ 2012 novel and is very (very) loosely based on writer E.M. Forster, who spent some years of his life in the house of a policeman and his wife, in a kind of unorthodox somewhat polyamorous relationship. As the story goes, Forster was romantically devoted to the policeman but found intellectual stimulation with his wife. That real-life trio made it work, in a way. The actual Forster story might make for an intriguing account of alternatives to monogamy. And perhaps, Roberts’ novel – albeit more sensational – could make a good feature film. This is not that film, for several reasons. As is the case with many bad films, there is enough blame to go around here. And “My Policeman” is an unpleasant slog of a film that feels like a liability for most involved, but it feels especially telling for Harry Styles, who fails to evoke the kind of passion to which two potential lovers, and the film’s title, should consider to be an object of such devotion.

In theory, one might imagine that Styles’ fame, his chipper energy, and sanitised good looks, were enough to make the filmmakers bet on him as a good choice for the lead. But beyond the merely superficial, the match between what the film demands of Tom – charismatic in a charmingly boorish way, stolid and brawny – feels all wrong for Styles. From our first image of him in the film’s first flashback, his interpretation feels incongruous with what the film needs and the urgent erotic desire that’s so central to Tom’s relationships dissipates before there’s a possibility of any kind of emotional surety established. That “My Policeman” seems unable to do anything with the class dynamics that it invites feels as much indicative of the writing’s own vagueness, as it is in the ways Styles feels removed from any studied idea of what a man in such a time was like. The energy of his performance is all wrong. But Styles is not an anomaly. Corrin and Dawson feel equally out of place, to lesser degrees. There is little for Corrin to do when the film flattens her arc, depersonalising her character of any true sense of context. Dawson comes out of it the best, relatively, trying hard to eke something sensitive and earnest from the screenplay’s very prosaic approach to gay tragedy but there’s too little for him to play with, especially when the decades-spanning romance between Tom and Patrick feels immediately quelled by the coolness of the onscreen dynamic between him and Styles. The actors have too little chemistry with each other, Styles and Dawson or Styles and Corrin or all three put together. The presentday sequences depend on an interplay of personality that justifies the time-jump, but in each moment of passion – romantic, adversarial, or explosive – what should feel passionate flails off in an arid listlessness.

In the “present” day, Linus Roache can try all he might as Tom, but beyond his half-hearted attempts the characters are so flatly played that the dialogue’s arguments for desire, attraction or love feel facile. What exactly does this film care to articulate about sexuality, masculinity, marriage, or memories? It’s hard to say, especially when so much of “My Policeman” feels trapped in its conceptual stage. The idea — a tragic romance spanning decades filled with betrayals — is intriguing, but this doesn’t feel thought out, so much so that the idea of Harry Styles growing up to become Linus Roache (or Dawson growing up to be Rupert Everett) feels improbable. It’s more than an oversight in casting, but the line between the characterisations of the past and the characterisation of the present is so thin that it could very well be a different pair of characters in either era. Like so much of the film, it feels slipshod, as if no one stopped to consider it beyond the superficial. “My Policeman” wants the grandness of tragic love, but only ends up with the falsity of dull people foiled by their own dullness. When two important events happen near the end (a brief incarceration, and a later cruel reveal as to why) the film seems as if it’s waiting for us to be moved but it is impossible to be moved in the absence of anything that feels urgent.

The framing device traps us in that gloomy house for a good quarter of the running time and does little to establish any kind of visual language or specificity for these spaces or any relationship between the space and the people there. It looks fine enough, but it rarely feels lived in. Instead, “My Policeman” is presented with the kind of tidiness that feels indistinct when examined as a key to illuminating anything thoughtful about these people or their world or their feelings. Revelations come after the fact; we jump through time with no sense of when or how. The narrative ambiguities feel like an artistic flourish meant to suggest profundity but feel more believable as a mask to hide the film’s own nothingness. In its closing moment, the audience is offered what seems to be some attempt at providing a cathartic moment of romance. That very moment feels much more thought out than much of what came before, as if the potential poignancy was more considered than anything that came before. But, how to invest in a moment of acuity when we have never been invited to care or understand any of these people?

The film’s construction only emphasises its narrative and emotional turgidity, where the pristine surfaces in “My Policeman” feel more mocking than anything else. As an act of romance, it is cold; as an act of interrogative queer history, it offers nothing. Art, any art, has something needful that it wants to communicate. When art is good, we feel that needfulness in the urgency, its emotiveness, its spirit. “My Policeman” has none of that urgency, or sincerity, or style. Its performers seem lost in the maze. As our central figure, Styles feels adrift. Grandage’s approach feels too emotionally removed to stir the passion needed. “My Policeman” wants to mine the inevitability of gay tragedy for artistic effect, but none of these places or people, beyond Kadiff Kirwan as a medic, feels real. It all exists as a thing, subsumed in its own dullness. Cold and empty and tedious.

My Policeman begins streaming on PrimeVideo on November 4.