I was lucky enough to be at one of the very first screenings of My Policeman at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was definitely one of the best movies that I have seen so far this year. The film is based on the book My Policeman by Bethan Roberts and stars Harry Styles, David Dawson, Emma Corrin, Linus Roache, Rupert Everett and Gina McKee.
The movie is a tragic love story about forbidden love, tragedy, changing social views and heartbreak. The movie is set in two different time periods, showing the power of love, heartbreak and the effect it holds decades later. Styles, Dawson and Corrin play Tom, Patrick and Marion in the 1950s while Roache, Everett and McKee play these same three characters decades later in the 1990s.
My Policeman is a complex story that follows the lives of Tom, Patrick and Marion and the love shared between them. Tom is a policeman in the 1950s in Brighton who marries Marion and discovers that he has feelings of love and lust for Patrick. During this period, being homosexual was illegal which added serious complications to their story. Since the movie is set in two time periods, viewers can see how their story unfolds and the impact that it has on them decades later.
As far as book-to-movie adaptations go, I can confidently say that it was one of the best that I have ever seen. There are often times when too much of the book is cut out or altered in order to make it into a movie or the plot isn’t portrayed as well as many of the readers would have hoped. This is not the case for My Policeman. I feel like they did an absolutely incredible job taking the scenes from the pages onto the screen. There are some parts that feel like they took exactly what I had envisioned in my head and turned it into beautifully done scenes.
Everything about the film was beautiful and heartbreaking. The visuals were stunning and the acting was superb. Each of the actors brought a sense of emotion and vulnerability to the characters, which really brought the book to life. There was no point where I thought that the acting could have been done any better. I thought that they all did an incredible job bringing these characters to life and depicting this tragic yet beautiful story.
I don’t think that there’s anything bad that I can say about the movie. I both laughed and cried throughout the film, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. The movie is nearly two hours long, yet I couldn’t help but be surprised that the movie was over because I was so captivated by the story. Overall, I think that I would give the movie a four-and-a-half-star rating. My Policeman is out in select theatres on October 21, 2022, and available on Prime Video on November 4, 2022. I personally can’t wait to watch it again!