John Logan’s They/Them attempts to grapple with longstanding issues of queer representation in horror, where gay and trans characters’ isolation from “normal” society manifests as aberrant, often murderous behavior. The film’s setting in a gay conversion therapy camp not only allows LGBTQ+ characters to be the central characters instead of the lone freaks but also not-so-subtly invokes Sleepaway Camp, one of the most notorious examples of a killer’s psychotic behavior being explicitly linked to their sexual and gender identity. Here, the malignant forces are not such people but the very faces of heteronormative society who repress them.
The film peaks early, when we arrive at the camp with a new batch of LGBTQ+ teenagers to meet its head, Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon). He welcomes the kids with language rooted in the kind of progressive bromides that evangelicals usually decry, speaking calmly about not wanting to make anyone a person they’re not, of respecting their pronouns and the like. Yet in his talk of “inclusion” are the hints of his underlying ideology, making casually sexist jokes about his wife, Cora (Carrie Preston), being “she who must be obeyed” and revealing the extent of their physical isolation at the camp. Bacon’s performance in these initial scenes, constantly slipping razor blades into verbal candies meant to tempt his young charges, is the film’s easy highlight. Case in point: Owen says he respects non-binary teen Jordan’s (Theo Germaine) transition, but when another teen girl, Alexandra (Quei Tann), is revealed to be trans without her admission, he abruptly flies into a rage and immediately begins deadnaming the teen.
That outburst prefigures Bacon’s work swiftly being flattened into mustache-twirling villainy by a leaden script that reduces all of its characters to the most simplistic stereotypes. It takes little time for Owen’s mask to drop, and even less for Cora’s as the woman aggressively taunts the kids’ identities in individual sessions. As for the teens themselves, they are a parade of regressive stereotypes: a catty theater geek who speaks exclusively in drawled sass (Austin Crute), a closeted jock (Cooper Koch), even a girl (Anna Lore) who genuinely is open to the process if it means she can fit in among her conservative milieu.
Of a cast of barely more than a dozen youths, half do not have lines, and those who do seem to speak only in awkwardly blunt phrases that clearly express their emotions and sense of self. One reason conversion therapy is so abhorrent is that it is used on young people who are still figuring out who they are, thus making them additionally vulnerable to attack from those who prey on their insecurities and doubts. Everyone here, though, has a fully formed grasp of their identities and sexual interests, even Lore’s Kim. This is perhaps because every speaking character is of legal age, an attribute that seems to exist mainly to let the audience off the hook when we are treated to copious images of counselors hungrily spying on the teens.
This inadvertently softens, however slightly, the counselors, which becomes relevant when a masked killer appears in the camp and begins targeting not the kids but the adults who are trying to remold them. Though the film’s opening scene introduces the unknown assailant, they disappear until the film’s second half, which then rushes through its kills as if terrified to dwell on the possible catharsis of seeing these tormentors meet brutal fates.
And therein lies the chief issue with They/Them: it’s a horror film dealing with a dicey subject open to numerous ambiguities and complexities that require a filmmaker to confront and even embrace the inherently problematic medium of horror as a means of externalizing such issues, but it is so desperate to avoid offense that it ends up making retrograde moral points. From having its teenage characters completely sure of their identities and thus impervious from the start to the counselors’ methods, to the counselors themselves never getting to do more than hint at their own pasts as youths sent to similar programs, the film backs away from every uncomfortable possibility of three-dimensionality. Worse, it wants badly to avoid letting the audience feel any sensation of joy at the death of another that it ends up placing the killer as being as bad, if not worse, than those whose psychological torment might have forged them in the first place. Unable to express empathy for either its suffering teens or its manipulative adults, They/Them ends up with a weak moral chiding at the audience themselves for even the slightest approval they might feel for Owen and his underlings being subjected to the fear they’ve inflicted on others.
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