They/Them

This movie is getting hammered everywhere. I don’t quite think it deserves the hate it gets (especially not the homophobic asshole “reviews” that hate it just because it has LGBTQ+ themes). But I don’t think it achieves anything the makers wanted it to. The movie, somehow, has multiple identity crises going on at the same time. The first is that it forgets that, in order to be a horror movie — and more specifically, a horror movie with a social message in it — it has to not be afraid to go for it. Horror as a genre provides a unique opportunity for filmmakers to throw inhibition to the wind. They/Them feels restrained; when it wants to inject the slasher elements (which feel tacked on and unnecessary), all the kills are ruined by cutting away, so the impact is gone. This isn’t “oh, show me the blood!” talking; this movie is, in large part, about hate. The killer hates their victims. We should see that hate, and the instead, the movie turns away from it. In the same way, it holds back on showing the true horror of the conversion camp. Yes, there’s a torture scene, and some creepy pedo predatory behavior, but the horror is never given much more than surface exploration through the eyes of the queer and gender-fluid people who are living it. There’s a character who is, basically, Emilio Estevez from The Breakfast Club, except he doesn’t want to be gay because it’ll disappoint his dad and he’s afraid it’ll tank his college scholarship, so he’s at the camp to erase that. That is NEVER explored beyond him explaining it and initial resistance to his fellow campers (which melts away during a singalong). That is a missed opportunity, to show this boy’s horror towards the identity he is and desperation to embrace anything else. And the movie wastes so much time setting up Kevin Bacon as genial and somehow LGBTQ+ friendly, and we know he isn’t. We know that’s an introductory veneer. WHY BOTHER?!? It doesn’t ratchet up tension, because we KNOW he’s gonna drop the facade eventually and try to scare and torture these kids. Instead of using that, instead of showing the actual horror of conversion camps, it waffles and builds to something you already know is coming and should be here already. Which brings us to the second identity crisis, and that is the two conflicting movies here. On one hand, there is a flawed but decent psychological horror movie with kids at a conversion camp. That by itself has a lot of potential. The other part is a camp slasher. Not unique by any stretch, but the setting of a conversion camp could add some interesting depth. Except that, outside of the opening kill, the slasher element DISAPPEARS ENTIRELY for over an hour. So when murders start happening more than an hour in, it feels like a completely different movie started and ripped the characters of first movie and shoved them into it. Because the slasher elements are so watered down, they lose impact. Because the kills are all of a certain group of people (the camp staff), it minimizes the victim pool. And because it’s done so late in the game, it has to speed-run through everything you’d get in a 90 minute slasher movie in a third of the time. It’s unsatisfying and ineffective, and because it is a completely different tone from the sixty minutes that came before, it has to jettison everything it had been doing to make room for a slasher movie. It would be like ending Breaking Bad by having Walter White become John Wick. And then there’s the identity crisis the ending creates. Spoilers ahead. So, the killer turns out to be a former camper there. They are angry about their experience. They feel like their soul and identity has been burned out of them, and they want to destroy not just this camp, but all camps, and I mean literally. So the finale has a non-binary kid caught in the middle of  Bacon’s smarmy hate-monger still trying to push his “I’m just trying to help” thing, and the killer saying everybody who hates the LGBTQ+ community should be wiped off the face of the earth in the most violent way possible. Now, I am a very proud supporter of the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t get why people can hate others simply because of what they want to do with their kibbles and bits, or because they don’t feel like the pieces they got assigned by biology match their internal identity. Hatred of people for sexuality or gender identity is a crying shame, and while I know it’ll never be eradicated, I hope one day to see it marginalized to the most insignificant of minorities. But by making the opposition of the conservative “make them hetero-normal” mindset to be “murder anybody who hates us” undercuts the movie’s message and ruins any attempt at nuance this movie could ever hope to have. For a movie about accepting identity behind the binary, They/Them wants the argument to be binary. It presents both sides as equally villainous. And while Jordan does say they reject both ideologies and just wants to be themself, it doesn’t change the fact that the killer’s motive muddles the movie’s message entirely. It’s hard to feel good about all these homophobes getting brutally killed when we know it’s coming from the same place that spawned the conversion camp: hatred so deep, it blinds reason. And worst of all, making the killer a former camp attendee and draping them with this motive feels like a concession to the “both sides now” mentality and underscores how this movie is too afraid to commit or offend. It doesn’t want to make anybody THE bad guy, so it makes EVERYBODY a bad guy. Both sides are wrong. Well, no, that’s not how it works here. When it comes to discrimination, bigotry, and hatred, there IS a bad guy, and there is only ONE bad guy. And it ain’t the side that’s being hated for who they are. Even if their response to the hate isn’t good, their response wouldn’t exist without the discrimination. This movie is too afraid to say that. So why did I give this the score that it did with all these flaws? Because, despite the flaws and missed opportunities and botched messaging, for an hour, this is a decent movie. Theo Germaine, who plays the non-binary protagonist Jordan (and is non-binary themselves), does a fantastic job portraying a person living in between the gap of a world designed for a binary system, even at a conversion camp. All the campers do a great job, in fact. Anna Chlumsky is enjoyable as the camp nurse. And Kevin Bacon is fantastic as Owen; his disarming charm in the beginning is almost enough to make you think maybe this place isn’t as horrible as a conversion camp is, and when he starts to turn, he’s chilling. Overall, the movie is dragged up to the level of watchable on performances alone. I think it’s destined to be forgotten, which is a shame. It could’ve been memorable if it had the guts to pick a side and a message and drive it home. As it stands, it’s mostly forgettable and definitely lamentable. It could’ve been great, if it had just picked a lane. Hooptober 2022 movie #31/31