Har­ry Styles is the long arm of the law in the first My Police­man trailer

The shad­owy illu­mi­nati-type orga­ni­za­tion of enter­tain­ment indus­try titans and assort­ed pow­ers that be has come to the con­sen­sus that Har­ry Styles will be a movie star, and this will be the year to make it hap­pen. This fall, he’ll go to town on Flo­rence Pugh and inspire one thou­sand gifs in the psy­chothriller Don’t Wor­ry Dar­ling, and then he’ll cement his moment with a sec­ond big-screen vehi­cle in the form of My Policeman.

The first trail­er arrived online this morn­ing for the upcom­ing adap­ta­tion of Bethan Roberts’ nov­el, which tracks three inter­twined lives from the ​’50s to the ​’90s in Britain, as social upheavals send shock­waves through their rela­tion­ships. The vague­ness of that descrip­tion is reflect­ed in the trail­er itself, which shows us a lot of gold­en-hued shots of peo­ple look­ing pen­sive, with­out much nar­ra­tive con­text to under­stand what everyone’s so moody about.

A quick Google reveals a more sub­stan­tive break­down of the premise: Styles por­trays Tom, a gay cop unable to leave the clos­et in the repres­sive mid­cen­tu­ry cli­mate. For the sake of appear­ances, he mar­ries school­teacher Mar­i­on (Emma Cor­rin), all the while car­ry­ing on with an affair in the arms of muse­um cura­tor Patrick (David Daw­son). The plot then jumps ahead far­ther into adult­hood, as grown ver­sions of these char­ac­ters (Linus Roache, Gina McK­ee, and Rupert Everett, respec­tive­ly) reck­on with the choic­es made all those years ago.

This marks the sec­ond fea­ture film effort as direc­tor for the­atre vet­er­an Michael Grandage, last seen on screen at the helm of Genius, a biopic about the close friend­ship between writer Tom Wolfe and his long­time edi­tor Maxwell Perkins. Now, he’ll explore the com­plex­i­ty of rela­tion­ships between men with a bit more direct­ness, bring­ing us anoth­er queer peri­od piece to fill the maw of demand widened by Por­trait of a Lady on Fire.

For fans of Styles, this will sup­ply them with a boun­ty of fresh mate­r­i­al to moon over frame by frame, and for con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists attempt­ing to suss out the pre­cise nature of his sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, an intrigu­ing new data point. For the rest of us, this film will be part of the com­ing season’s ref­er­en­dum on whether the boy can tru­ly act, a skill set not total­ly flexed in his dia­logue-free sulk-a-thon on Dunkirk, his biggest role to date.

My Police­man comes to cin­e­mas in the UK and US on 21 Octo­ber, then streams through Ama­zon Prime on 4 November.