In the Flesh: They/Them

Blumhouse has made a name for itself producing bland-looking horror billed as socially progressive, and writer/director John Logan’s They/Them slots neatly into place among its tedious and underwritten catalog. Set at a gay conversion camp and featuring a large and diverse cast of queer teens playing opposite genre stalwarts like Kevin Bacon and Carrie J. Preston, Logan’s film is in a self-evident rush to be relevant, with camp administrator Owen Whistler (Bacon) spouting bioessentialist Guardian headlines in every other scene and the teens holding a sickly-sweet singalong rendition of Pink’s ‘Fuckin’ Perfect’ to reassert their belief in themselves and their sexual and gender identities, but for all its efforts it has little to say that the average newly-out trans person couldn’t say better and quicker. It’s preoccupied with anodyne assertions of validity and “born this way” philosophizing, talking points from ten and twenty years ago dragged out to do their little dance in positioning the film’s moral center.

Nor does it have much to say about conversion therapy, an odious and highly socio-psychologically complex practice employed in many parts of the world. Here we see it framed as simple paternalistic sadism, and while Bacon sells the role of Whistler far better than it has any right to be sold, even his compelling performance can’t salvage the film’s fundamental hollowness. Conversion therapy is bad, it’s good to be yourself, but don’t be too militant about it. In spite of its gesture toward the predatory behavior of assimilationists, as with former campers turned engaged camp counselors Zane (Boone Platt) and Sarah (Hayley Griffith), who fuck while ogling teenage selfies adhering to their actual queer sexualities, or honeypot Gabriel’s (Darwin del Fabro) entrapment scam, They/Them ends on a primly centrist note. It’s wrong to kill your abuser, the film states loudly. It’s wrong to fight back against the people who torture and kill you, who ruin generation after generation of queer children out of little more than cruelty, knee-jerk disgust, and rigidity.

It doesn’t help that Anna Chlumsky is perhaps the most inert and underwhelming slasher villain in cinematic history, or that non-binary teen Jordan (Theo Germaine) can’t sell godawful dialogue like “No… I’m strong enough not to do it.” when avenging vigilante Angela (Chlumsky) tells him he’s strong enough to shoot and kill Owen. It’s a thin film, cardboard stereotypes thrown up to spout their respective talking points and then indifferently mowed down. Every Black character speaks with the same “fierce” Drag Race diction, every white character is rich and struggling with conformity, and everyone else is more or less an afterthought. Only the conventionally hottest and thinnest/most cut of the cast kiss or have sex onscreen. No one has anything approaching a backstory or motivation. None of them are even really characters in the strictest sense of the word, a real disservice to a largely talented young cast. And It's a Blumhouse production, so everything is lit like a dentist's waiting room. They/Them is thin gruel masquerading as a banquet.