This is a fact-based story focused on Caroline Meagher((Helen Baxendale), a sergeant in the Royal British Military Police. With 12 years experience, she is stationed in Northern Ireland and assigned to rooting out and questioning suspected lesbians in armed forces. Along the way, she will begin her own slow discovery of her sexual nature. She began a sexual affair with a Scottish woman and went to great lengths to avoid detection. When it is discovered, she must face the pressures of her own grilling by investigators. Before her homosexuality was actually proved, she quit the army which denied any keeping of intelligence files on lesbians.The cast also includes: Laura Fraser, Ian Burfeld, Anna Bolt, Katrina Levon, Sean Gilder and Zara Turner.

The Investigator is the story of the former British Army sergeant Caroline Meagher. She joined a military police unit tasked with hunting down and exposing lesbian women within the ranks, as the Army still barred sexual minorities from serving in the 1980s (and still did when the film was made). Only she later found out that she was lesbian herself. The film dramatises her double life in and eventual dismissal from the Army.There is an obvious reason why the film advertises the fact that it was made without MoD co-operation. While it allows the military to argue for its own rules and their enforcement, no matter how senseless or discriminatory they may appear from a contemporary civilian viewpoint, it holds no punches in drawing a harrowing picture of the methodology used in that enforcement. The work of the investigator is shown as endless witch hunts for sexual deviancy and interminable archiving of every little hint, rumour or suggestion born from "crew cut, doesn't fancy me, ergo lesbian" style logic, of grossly invasive personal searches and degrading interrogations about sexual histories and personal associations. The pitiless system reduces skilled women eager to serve their country into vile criminals and chews them up.The view is all Meagher's and the viewer is directed to sympathise with her, even if her own actions sometimes appear ambiguous. In fact, after the drama ends, Caroline Meagher herself appears on the screen to sum up the story and to describe the Army's secretive policy about its personnel databases. This may be heavy-handed and personal, but it does not diminish the wider implications of the story.Independent of its agenda, The Investigator is an effective piece of modestly budgeted television drama. The film keeps up a good tension by juggling between different periods, at the same time showing the innocent Meagher's descent into the sordid reality of investigative machinery and her more world-hardened version fighting the full brunt of that same machinery, showing how dealing with the former realities forced her to slowly spun a web of deception that threatens to trap her in the end. There is little excess fat in the narrative, just a relentlessly bleak procession of fear, uncertainty, humiliating interrogations and paranoid double existence, relieved only by fleeting moments of intimate warmth or flash scenes of terrorism in Northern Ireland. The last may well be meant to underline the ridiculousness of a situation where sexual minorities are targeted with similar ardency and methods as terrorists, as pointed out by Meagher at one point. A good point to remember in an era where terrorism has been used to justify ever increasing control and surveillance in all spheres of society and the methods of invasion have grown far more sophisticated than the index cards and 1980s computers in The Investigator.This is truly a women's film, and Baxendale holds it up supremely in the lead role, as another competent but emotionally vulnerable woman in a harshly masculine world, in line with her contemporaneous roles in Truth Or Dare and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Levon also gives a strong performance as a more experienced and savvy staff sergeant who initiates Meagher into the closeted reality of the armed forces. The men don't get much chance for sympathy. They are portrayed as wife-beating misogynists, ice-cold bureaucrats behind tight lips and steely gazes or just cheerfully laddish bastards with prominent regional accents.

Excellent hard to find movie, that was on TV in the UK. Why has it not been released on video or DVD? Who knows? On TV in 1997, and made a hit with the mainstream lesbian movie watchers. Shows at about the time Clinton was starting the don't ask, don't tell thing about the military, this goes to show what is really going on in the military. Of course this is set in England, but the same rings through for the states or anyone else in a military setting or governmental run agency. This movie can be had if someone really wants to find it....you can do a search in google, and who knows? Truly a well done movie, great love scenes, and a ending that will knock your socks off! Lesmovies on yahoo groups.