Mark Reviews Movies: THEY/THEM

They/Them, Peacock

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

A woman drives down a forest road at night, gets a flat tire, discovers a spike strip on the pavement, and hears something in the woods. From its opening moments, writer/director John Logan's They/Them announces itself as a horror story (If you pronounce the punctuation between the two pronouns, that's also a clue as to the movie's apparent aims). Sure enough, after a fake-out, there is a masked killer, wielding an axe, within the trees, and the anonymous woman is dispatched in an explosion of safety glass and blood.

Starting a horror story in this way is a cliché so established that it's basically a requirement at this point, but it's also a promise on the part of the filmmaker. Logan has little intentions of keeping that promise.

Here is a movie that clearly wants to be something else, do other things, and deal with different ideas than a generic slasher story that watches as a bunch of people are picked off one by one by a mysterious killer. The setting is a camp in the woods, which is nothing new (The career of the big-name star in this one got his start by appearing in something with a similar setup over 40 years ago). The unique element is that this particular camp deals in so-called "conversion therapy," which seeks to transform gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and similar people into sexualities and identities that fit a conservative societal "norm."

The camp is run by Owen (Kevin Bacon), who greets a busload of new students, as he calls them, with a casual and polite air. He pronounces that there's no judgment in this camp, and as for religious talk, it's raised once with a promise to never be spoken again.

Owen promises that he and his fellow counsellors aren't there to force the students to become straight or identify as the gender they were assigned at birth. When their time at camp is finished, he just hopes they'll learn something about and be more authentic as themselves. It's a good speech, which means we're immediately waiting for the other side of it.

The campers are a diverse bunch. The de facto protagonist of the large group, which is too sizeable for Logan to really give most of them any qualities beyond broad personalities, is Joran (Theo Germaine), who is transgender and identifies as non-binary. Germaine has a no-nonsense, confident, and somewhat secretive presence that makes us wish there were a bit more to the character than merely serving as a passive leader of sorts (There's an unfortunate passivity even when Jordan does take the spotlight in the third act), but it's a solid performance, regardless.

Some of the other campers include jock Stu (Cooper Koch), who—like fellow student Kim (Anna Lore)—is gay but doesn't want to be, and Toby (Austin Crute), who's flamboyant and loves musical theater. Alexandra (Quei Tann) is a transgender woman (The revelation of that is questionably played as the shocking climax of a sequence of the camera stalking her like a killer), and Veronica (Monique Kim) is bisexual and generically tough. There isn't much more to these characters, save for some confessional montages, soap opera-like romances, and an awkward sing-along in a cabin.

Logan writes himself into a corner in a couple ways right at the start. First, is there really a need for a masked killer in a setup like this, which makes it increasingly clear—as if it's not apparent from the beginning—that there's something sinister happening in this camp and with the goals/methods of its counsellors? An anonymous villain simply isn't as scary as the ones standing right there, smiling with seemingly thoughtful but obviously false sentiments about tolerance and caring, as we wait for the mask of pleasantries to drop.

Second, once it becomes clear that the movie would rather examine the lives of the campers—as thin as that examination may be—and slowly pick apart the aims of the counsellors, all the potential suspense of some masked killer in the woods disappears. It's unlikely that Logan would treat these characters in the inherently dismissive way that making them inevitable victims of the slasher would do. Beyond that, since the identity of the killer's ultimate targets immediately gives away the game that's being played here, the movie intentionally delays its horror trappings until the final 20 minutes or so.

This is a horror movie that basically forgets it's supposed to be one, while mostly ignoring the more obvious source of terror that's front and center. The camp and those in charge of it are the real threat of They/Them, and if the final scenes of the movie are any indication, Logan seems hesitant to fully acknowledge that fact.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products