Editor’s Note: Spoilers ahead.
John Logan’s They/Them is a disaster.
The first half of the film wades into uncomfortable territory, but I held out hope — hope that it was taking bold swings with the concept and could have been something special. By the end, it didn’t simply wade into irredeemable territory, but dove headfirst, in a misfire of a climax as exploitatively patronizing as 13 Reasons Why.
They/Them is a slasher that takes place at a conversion therapy camp. It opens with a deceptively comforting orientation from Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon), disarming the attendants. He’s trying to come across like a cool youth pastor, telling them not to worry about “homophobic bullshit,” to let them be themselves, and so on. Bacon delivers the monologue comfortably, charismatically. This makes his aggressive turn an unsurprising but effective pull of the rug from underneath our feet, as he violently tosses a trans woman (Alexandra, played by Quei Tann) into the boys cabin; furious that she “lied” about their identity.
This is the start of the torment the campers go through. There’s a great deal of psychological torment, such as Jordan’s (Theo Germaine) session with campground psychologist Cora (Carrie Preston). Cora digs into Jordan’s psyche with vain cruelty disguised as compassion. It then progresses to a combination of psychological and physical torment, like the sequence where Toby (Austin Crute) is angrily threatened by Whistler to shoot the dying camp dog in the head. These scenes range from relatively intense, to potentially concerning.
It’s not as though the scenes are poorly written or acted. The drama and characters are believable. Yet the film is walking a fine line, and you’re constantly left with the sense that it’s going to bungle it all in the end. But, to be fair to the wretched ending, it’s not as though They/Them’s failures rest entirely on its shoulders, as its awful ambitions are completely unveiled when Stu (Cooper Koch) is strapped to a chair, so he can be violently electrocuted as a form of aversion therapy.
Amidst all this, counselors get picked off one by one by an anonymous killer who is clearly seeking vengeance, with these kills mostly being offscreen. When the killer is revealed, they ask for a(n unspoiled) camper to help kill the final counselor, only for the film to follow the most textbook, after school special approach possible.
There is a need for art that challenges us, for art to hold up a mirror to the horrifying reality of our world. The core problem with They/Them is that it simply doesn’t have the craft or good taste to properly follow through on what it wants to show us. The throwback slasher vibe, for instance, is alarmingly at odds with images like electrocuting a gay man as aversion therapy. Slashers are well within their rights to get political, but you should at least know what you’re trying to say. Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a magnificent combination of horror and satire, with a dose of comedy, all to highlight Peele’s “fears as an African-American man on screen.” Last year’s Halloween Kills may have villainized the town of Haddonfield for going too far, but it was smart enough to specifically criticize the vanity of morons who all think they’re Captain Ahab.
They/Them sorely lacks the cohesive foundation of either film. It doesn’t say anything about, or with, its horror. It just tortures LGBT people in ways you could see in any other slasher film, slaps on a label that says “commentary,” and goes tsk tsk when someone fights back. We’re supposed to feel empowered when the camper powerfully tells the killer that “no one will tell me what to do ever again,” all while slapping the person that killed child torturers and rapists on the wrist for going too far.
In the context of whatever the movie intended to be, it’s useless. It’s useless as commentary and useless as empowerment. Anything good that comes out of this film doesn’t come from the film itself, but instead the reaction that it’s had, because the only queer people I’ve seen empowered by this movie, are empowered through their rage, by shouting to the rooftops, and letting other queer people know that we deserve better than this garbage.
