They/Them (2022) | analysis + review
I’m going to preface this with a very candid statement that I went into this film with no expectations, to make sure that my opinion was not jaded, and I was giving the film a truly sincere shot. I pinky swear I did. My first viewing of THEY/THEM began with me in a good, relaxed mindset after a decent day of hobbies and rest - seriously, these were the best conditions for movie watching.
The ultimate issue with THEY/THEM is the deeply palpable lack of explicit understanding and clarity of the subject matter it attempts to present. Please, don’t feed me gruel and tell me its caviar. This film is sanitized and shallow and I, as a heavily marginalized trans person, do not feel thankful for the scraps that they laid before me, attempting to convince me it contained some sort of liberating, revealing truth. One thing that remains consistent throughout the runtime of the film is it's painfully self-congratulatory attitude, almost as if we're meant to see Kevin Bacon, the leader of this queer conversion camp, as so dutiful, charming and accepting that we forget he is, in fact, running a conversion camp. But he just is not that impressive.
Half-truths are not truths, and I will not placate them as such as it does a disservice to all of us. This movie is not the inclusive haven that it was hailed to be, many of the queer, trans, gender diverse folks shown in the trailer were background characters with no personality and no lines, often referred to in caricaturing ways ( the one fat girl gets a compliment on her pie, cool).
There is a massively insensitive and somewhat pointless scene in which one of the girl campers, a Black trans girl named Alexandra, is showering and she gets walked in on by another girl camper, the reaction of the intruder immediately tells us that she saw something she didn’t expect to see – and then we quick cut to the embarrassed girl being marched over to the boys cabin. It’s wildly transmisogynistic, and it didn’t feel like a commentary on the nonsensical nature of feeling violated by merely seeing someone's body, but rather a crass and misplaced rehashing of a trope present in film for a long time, one that adds nothing to the story or the character, but merely makes their personhood centered around their violation. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be heartening to us that Jordan, the nonbinary camper and main character, is kind to Alexandra and protects her from the boys in the cabin who waste no time hurling abuses at her, but it feels bare minimum, half spoken, a toothless declaration of allyship.
Later on in the film, Alexandra has her estradiol taken away by counselors, and has to pour out her truth and pain to the white woman keeping her hormones hostage, in order to get them back. This is presented in the film as if it is meant to be a tender moment, but I can only see it for what it really is. This woman only pretends to care, but her care is simply guilt from having a vulnerable person disembowel themselves in front of her enough that she could connect to the humanity in her. I don’t find it honorable, or heartwarming. It makes me feel sick in the same way it does when you know you’re being made fun of but everyone insists you are a part of the joke, not the joke itself.
One of the biggest dynamic flaws in THEY/THEM is that it appears to believe it is creating caricatures, outlandish portrayals of realistic things, but they're not. These are just normal ass people. They're not scary movie villains that parallel real evils, they don’t act in these wildly grand ways that shift the earth beneath us. They act in ways I see all the time.The characters in this film are the soccer moms who make dope brownies for bake sales that also kicked her teenage child out for asserting their own personhood. They’re the nice lady who runs the farmers market and makes signs for TERF rallies. They are not the conversion camp running cold and perceptive villains, subtly and overtly sewing evil into the fabric of all they pretend to hold dear. The insults and abuses said during the conversion sequences are not exaggerated enough to give me satire, to give me horror that strikes me and fills me with dread. When you’re someone who has lived life as a racialized trans person, you hear a lot of shit, you see a lot of shit I’m 'm sure they believe these words and actions are something that would be painful and horrifying for me to hear, but in reality it just pisses me off that i'm listening to the same kinds of arguments i see on twitter everyday. If you are going to create a horror film that you market to lgbtqia+ people, and you seek to instill us with fear and dread by mirroring reality, please, give it some teeth. It’s a little insulting the creators believed this is what would phase me, phase us.
Another heartbreakingly inappropriate moment in the film is when it spins out into some of the campers singing Pink’s “Fucking perfect” together in a moment that is surely meant to be the sanctuary, the reprieve, and I do, for one split second watching queer people marinate in their joy until I see the sole Black boy character start VOGUING – to PINK! This is literally just the only moment they could find to insert some Black culture into the film so they decided to do it there, and piss me off. Nobody is voguing to Pink. Especially not that song.
We also get some cool predatory lesbian stereotype scenes that do nothing in the way to express it as satire, so I have no reason to believe this was elevated comedy or commentary. THEY/THEM feels like a film that sold a concept first, and attempted to piece together a story after the fact, and after the story they picked through it to insert some kind of sincere depth into parts, but unsuccessfully. Gender politics are complex and they require nuance and understanding, things that slasher films don’t typically contain, and this film is no different.
It feels like in trying to not be offensive, they actually offended me by sanitizing what the experiences of queer and trans young adults in america is really like, especially right now with tensions steadily increasing. In a sentence – this is a movie for people who do not want kink at pride, and think cops belong there because they keep us safe.
Although the film is labeled a horror / slasher, nothing violent happens until the third act, and the build up toward it isn’t satisfying as it drags on and bogs itself down, sprinkling in social commentary that doesn’t land. The murders themselves are okay, decent looking and the mask of the killer is honestly my favorite part of the film - it’s creepy and doesn’t really fit the aesthetic of any of the characters introduced to us at the camp so it obscures the mystery of who exactly the killer might be in a very creative way.
Though in mentioning the mystery, I should note that while the mystery of the killer's identity is obscured, the kills don't start until the last act of the movie, so you have plenty of time to figure it all out and I certainly did before everything was made clear. HEY/THEM is quintessential “don't say gay” cinema but in the context of lesbianism, as we have multiple lesbian characters but the word isn't said once. But wait - we do get a scene of a harsh close up of an empty-eyed white woman calling one of the campers a “sad lonely little dyke”. Cool!
THEY/THEM feels like one of the many inevitable consequences of instagram infographic culture and the draw of the mass consumption that’s available to us via the internet. It mentions themes but then rejects exploring them in even the most shallow ways. THEY/THEM is a very layered film, but I don’t mean that positively. The direction of the film is aimless, the script is nearly unforgivable in far too much of the runtime, the editing doesn’t accentuate any of the substance that’s given to us, the soundtrack is god awful.
The one saving grace of this is the fact that those young adults acted their asses off given the steaming pile of a script offered to them. I hope to see many of them in future works that honor their talent. I feel deep shame that the writers and directors of the film seemed to not understand the gravity of so much of the subject matter here.
That’s what was truly horrifying, out of all of it. Alexandra is forcibly outed, made to beg for her hormones, and then misgendered and deadnamed for the REST OF THE FILM! She never budges, never gets upset, never shows it as the horrifying aggressive action that it is. Which is to say, not every trans person minds being misgendered or deadnamed — but this is not the format or medium to apply things like that. This film isn’t written for or by transfeminine people who are making a statement about something, but it is written by cis people who seek to commodify and simplify our pain for profit and entertainment.
It makes the dehumanization that is being misgendered and deadnamed a matter of scene setting and discards the reality of what that experience would be like for someone forcibly living in a boys cabin having to secretly take her hormones, while she is dead named by everyone around her. And I am infuriated at the fact that they allow this, and they do not deadname or misgender the titular trans nonbinary character, Jordan, to make any points. Only Alexandra and her identity is used in this way. It’s messed up and its transmisogynoiristic and it makes me angry, because I know it was not intentional to show a nuanced portrait of subtle transmisogyny and I refuse to give them that benefit of doubt. She gets a ton of screentime, so it doesn’t make sense to say “oh Jordan is the primary protagonist, that's why they were gendered correctly”. It’s blatant transmisogyny and really upsetting to watch for a lot of reasons, but it’s not horrifying, I don’t feel dread - I feel pissed at my identity being made a spectacle of and called inclusion.
THEY/THEM never for a moment allows me to feel a genuine confrontation with the horror that is conversion camps and how violent transphobia and white cisheteropatriarchy is but it springs happily toward the bland messaging of “love yourself, you can be whoever” like yeah, we’re fucking trying but many people want us dead!
BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER is a film that addresses many of the subjects this film attempted to hit on, in much more horrifying and entertaining and less offensive ways, honestly. Even the SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE remake does a better job.
They attempted to drive me to the point of revulsion where I’d go “yeah, this is really brutal, this is so cruel, conversion therapy is bad” but it doesn’t realize the obvious flaw in that is that they advertised this as being for queer people - and we already know that, for the most part. This feels very eerily like rhetoric trans/queer/homophobic people will extract talking points from, in a trench coat with a rainbow on it.
Case in point - when Alexandra, takes over the group as they’re lost in the woods and one of the guys expresses doubt in her ability to navigate she quips back, verbatim, “I am a Black transgender woman!” and it’s not that the statement isn’t true, it’s just oddly placed. There was really no reason for that aside from the script to pat itself on the back for including a Black transfem in their movie, because we had been shown multiple times by this point that Alexandra is a strong girl who can hold her own without her doing…that. The ending of this film means nothing, really. They definitely give us banal “violence bad” messaging, with everybody living their best gay lives. It really makes a spectacle of the violence perpetrated against us as queer, trans, gay people. It feels like a show, and in the worst way possible. THEY/THEM is acid neutralized, and I don’t buy it as representation or a positive for myself or people like me. I’m happy for the queer and trans actors that earned visibility and resources for their work on this film, and proud of them for it - I believe they all, and we all deserve better than this.
1/2 star out of 5
more film reviews by salem void ⇣