Frigay the 13th
It was perhaps inevitable that a summer camp slasher was going to be set at a conversion camp eventually. It was probably less inevitable that it would be the directorial debut of John Logan, the screenwriter of The Last Samurai and The Aviator, but that's what we get with They/Them (pronounced They Slash Them, get it?), a project that Blumhouse believed in so much that they presented it as a gift to everyone's twelfth-favorite streaming service Peacock, to stream exclusively alongside old episodes of The Office, new episodes of Saved by the Bell, and *checks notes* Vanderpump Dogs.
The film takes place at the Whistler Camp, a conversion camp run by Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon) and his wife Cora (Carrie Preston). Despite the fact that Owen claims the camp to be progressive, even implying that those who don't wish to change can just chillax and take it easy over the course of the week, there are only boys' and girls' cabins, which presents the very first problem of many to young Jordan (Theo Germaine), a trans/nonbinary teen who is only here because it's a condition for them to get emancipated, and who is also the film's obvious Final Person (you will find that there are a lot of obvious slasher movie tropes being bandied about in They/Them, but best not to get distracted now).
Although there is a fluctuating number of extra campers who show up for group scenes like those random indoor kids who emerge from the shadows whenever they needed a big performance on Glee, there are only a few of these young folks who the film is particularly interested in following: Veronica (Monique Kim), whose prickly exterior begins to melt when she meets the self-hating Kim (Anna Lore); Stu (Cooper Koch), who seems to think he's better than everyone because he's a jock and has all the external trappings of masculinity; Toby (Austin Crute), who lacks any of those trappings; Gabriel (Darwin del Fabro), a quiet, withdrawn, type; and Alexandra (Quei Tann), a trans woman who is "found out" and forced to move to the boys' cabin in the first scene where Owen Whistler's supposedly progressive exterior begins to show its cracks.
The campers are put into more and more disturbing situations of the gay conversion variety, only finding one reluctant ally in the new hire nurse Molly (Anna Chlumsky). Eventually, someone in a mask begins killing people around the camp. Is it the camp's resident creepy groundskeeper who has cameras in the showers and lives in a room filled with broken ventriloquist dummies and is also named Balthazar (Mark Ashworth)? If you know a single thing about slasher movie tropes, you know it's obviously not him, but you gotta respect their Overcompensating Red Herring game. Who is it? Well, at the end of 1 hour and 44 minutes, you'll sure find out!
There's the first problem with They/Them right there. There are very few slashers that justify a screentime of longer than 90 minutes, and essentially all of them are Scream movies because, as explicit whodunits, their third acts get a second wind halfway through, following the killer reveal. They/Them fails to earn that additional 14 minutes, because it flat-out fails to be a slasher in the first place.
Oh, it thinks it's a slasher. I even could have forgiven its extreme reluctance to put its teen characters in danger for fear of upsetting even a single person on Tumblr if it had delivered good kills. I also could have forgiven the extremely poorly paced-out murder sequences, two of which occur a full 45 minutes apart from one another, if those murder sequences were good. But dear reader, I don't know if these kills were good, because they are not in the film. They are largely offscreen, either panned away from, framed out, or scuppered entirely by a cut to black. This is a slasher film that feels a slasher film is a pretty icky thing to be, and as a result, it is absolutely nothing.
Luckily, They/Them's extreme reluctance to be a slasher means that there's a whole other movie hiding in there, almost entirely separate from the murderous goings-on. That movie is about some teens at a punishingly awful summer camp, and it is at least intermittently successful.
It is most successful when evoking the real-life horrors that conversion camps trade in, especially in a "therapy" scene with Cora that allows Preston to go full Catherine Keener in Get Out. She delivers a lacerating monologue from behind a rictus grin and a treacly tone that is absolutely chilling. While her funhouse mirror vision of Betty Crocker is the best thing the film has going for it, the cast is generally solid. Bacon is clearly having fun, even if he pales in comparison to his onscreen partner, and all the teens are performed well by a troupe of bright-eyed newcomers. The only sour note is Chlumsky, who seems completely lost in a role that isn't doing her any favors on the page.
The campers' interactions are also generally pleasing, as they navigate the ways that their differing motivations for attending the camp clash with one another. These are the scenes that most resemble an actual movie assembled by a human being, though the character arcs are cut short when the camper storyline and the slasher storyline converge in the final 15 minutes, which is a dizzying display of some of the worst horror filmmaker decision-making of the last 10 years.
They/Them doesn't realize this, but the way it actually properly pays homage to the summer camp slashers of the 1980s is its entirely inexplicable and preposterous sex scene, which is reminiscent of the best moments of films like Madman or Cheerleader Camp. And by transliterating that type of scene into a queer milieu, it is actually meaningfully interacting with the idea of modernizing the subgenre. Unfortunately, this is the only time it ever happens, and it was by accident. They/Them is an agonizingly bad slasher, and no amount of good-not-great character work from young performers who deserve better could possibly redeem that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
The film takes place at the Whistler Camp, a conversion camp run by Owen Whistler (Kevin Bacon) and his wife Cora (Carrie Preston). Despite the fact that Owen claims the camp to be progressive, even implying that those who don't wish to change can just chillax and take it easy over the course of the week, there are only boys' and girls' cabins, which presents the very first problem of many to young Jordan (Theo Germaine), a trans/nonbinary teen who is only here because it's a condition for them to get emancipated, and who is also the film's obvious Final Person (you will find that there are a lot of obvious slasher movie tropes being bandied about in They/Them, but best not to get distracted now).
Although there is a fluctuating number of extra campers who show up for group scenes like those random indoor kids who emerge from the shadows whenever they needed a big performance on Glee, there are only a few of these young folks who the film is particularly interested in following: Veronica (Monique Kim), whose prickly exterior begins to melt when she meets the self-hating Kim (Anna Lore); Stu (Cooper Koch), who seems to think he's better than everyone because he's a jock and has all the external trappings of masculinity; Toby (Austin Crute), who lacks any of those trappings; Gabriel (Darwin del Fabro), a quiet, withdrawn, type; and Alexandra (Quei Tann), a trans woman who is "found out" and forced to move to the boys' cabin in the first scene where Owen Whistler's supposedly progressive exterior begins to show its cracks.
The campers are put into more and more disturbing situations of the gay conversion variety, only finding one reluctant ally in the new hire nurse Molly (Anna Chlumsky). Eventually, someone in a mask begins killing people around the camp. Is it the camp's resident creepy groundskeeper who has cameras in the showers and lives in a room filled with broken ventriloquist dummies and is also named Balthazar (Mark Ashworth)? If you know a single thing about slasher movie tropes, you know it's obviously not him, but you gotta respect their Overcompensating Red Herring game. Who is it? Well, at the end of 1 hour and 44 minutes, you'll sure find out!
There's the first problem with They/Them right there. There are very few slashers that justify a screentime of longer than 90 minutes, and essentially all of them are Scream movies because, as explicit whodunits, their third acts get a second wind halfway through, following the killer reveal. They/Them fails to earn that additional 14 minutes, because it flat-out fails to be a slasher in the first place.
Oh, it thinks it's a slasher. I even could have forgiven its extreme reluctance to put its teen characters in danger for fear of upsetting even a single person on Tumblr if it had delivered good kills. I also could have forgiven the extremely poorly paced-out murder sequences, two of which occur a full 45 minutes apart from one another, if those murder sequences were good. But dear reader, I don't know if these kills were good, because they are not in the film. They are largely offscreen, either panned away from, framed out, or scuppered entirely by a cut to black. This is a slasher film that feels a slasher film is a pretty icky thing to be, and as a result, it is absolutely nothing.
Luckily, They/Them's extreme reluctance to be a slasher means that there's a whole other movie hiding in there, almost entirely separate from the murderous goings-on. That movie is about some teens at a punishingly awful summer camp, and it is at least intermittently successful.
It is most successful when evoking the real-life horrors that conversion camps trade in, especially in a "therapy" scene with Cora that allows Preston to go full Catherine Keener in Get Out. She delivers a lacerating monologue from behind a rictus grin and a treacly tone that is absolutely chilling. While her funhouse mirror vision of Betty Crocker is the best thing the film has going for it, the cast is generally solid. Bacon is clearly having fun, even if he pales in comparison to his onscreen partner, and all the teens are performed well by a troupe of bright-eyed newcomers. The only sour note is Chlumsky, who seems completely lost in a role that isn't doing her any favors on the page.
The campers' interactions are also generally pleasing, as they navigate the ways that their differing motivations for attending the camp clash with one another. These are the scenes that most resemble an actual movie assembled by a human being, though the character arcs are cut short when the camper storyline and the slasher storyline converge in the final 15 minutes, which is a dizzying display of some of the worst horror filmmaker decision-making of the last 10 years.
They/Them doesn't realize this, but the way it actually properly pays homage to the summer camp slashers of the 1980s is its entirely inexplicable and preposterous sex scene, which is reminiscent of the best moments of films like Madman or Cheerleader Camp. And by transliterating that type of scene into a queer milieu, it is actually meaningfully interacting with the idea of modernizing the subgenre. Unfortunately, this is the only time it ever happens, and it was by accident. They/Them is an agonizingly bad slasher, and no amount of good-not-great character work from young performers who deserve better could possibly redeem that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: slashers
