They/Them

Directed by John Logan - 2/10

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

Seasoned screenwriter John Logan broke into the world of directing with his disastrous feature They/Them. Logan has been working in the industry for over 25 years and has been credited as a writer in 26 movies, including two Martin Scorsese films, two Ridley Scott films, and two James Bond films. However, these decades of experience did not result in a successful directorial debut for Logan. His self-proclaimed attempt to therapeutically contextualize gender within the horror genre resulted in a floundering and exploitative movie that upholds stereotypes rather than undermining them.

They/Them follows the experience of several campers who must spend the summer at a gay conversion camp led by the heir to the camp, Owen Whistler (played by Kevin Bacon). However, the campers and staff are also threatened by a mysterious killer who stalks the grounds once the sun goes down. John Logan seemed as if he sincerely wanted to create a film for young queer people to enjoy, but his characters are so stereotyped and one-dimensional that this intention is totally lost in nearly every scene of the movie. Writer Juan Barquin highlights the harm of these archetypes and describes the film as "so desperate to be progressive that it ends up circling back to being regressive."

The film takes cues from classic slashers, hence the title (They SLASH Them), but seems to completely misunderstand how a horror scene functions. For one, the visuals are entirely lacking in building tension, and the tonal shifts are disorienting. The movie constantly swaps between romance, horror, uninspired social commentary, and uplifting coming-of-age tones. Each theme seems to be competing with the others rather than working in harmony. 

Additionally, the horror aspects of the movie fall entirely flat at the most fundamental level. In nearly every horror movie, the killer (or other threatening force) targets the protagonist(s). That is what makes us scared - that the characters who we have grown to understand and empathize with are being threatened, and we feel the fear through them. However, in They/Them, the masked killer only targets the camp staff, whom the viewers are meant to despise. It is revealed in the denouement that the killer was a former camper who infiltrated the staff and murdered them one by one as a form of revenge. Each death scene poses no threat to the protagonists and, therefore, no threat to the audience. One can infer that Logan wanted to imply that the threat to the protagonists is the conversion therapy itself, but the movie's exposition does an entirely dull job of establishing any danger from the camp since each character is simply a hollow shell of a person without any inspired development.  

One of John Logan's goals, along with producer/star Kevin Bacon, was to bring awareness to what happens behind closed doors at conversion camps. They/Them features two graphic torture scenes in the process of showing viewers the tactics used in the conversion process, both of which come across as painfully unnecessary. However, to create an illuminating and well-received film about the dangers of conversion therapy, you do not need to rely on violence or a shock factor of any kind. 

Take the cult classic comedy But I'm a Cheerleader as an example. It seems to follow a similar formula initially but results in a much more successful film primarily due to its comical approach. But I'm a Cheerleader takes place in a conversion therapy camp but never tries to mitigate the genuinely horrifying experiences of surviving conversion therapy. Instead, director Jamie Babbit takes an approach similar to what Mel Brooks did with his classic musical comedy The Producers, which famously was one of the first movies to portray Hitler in a purposefully humorous manner. Brooks shows Hitler in a comical light but does so in a way that undermines his power. "By using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths," said Brooks in a 2006 interview. He continues, "...we take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded him and protected him like a cordon." But I'm a Cheerleader succeeds in the same way that The Producers does - by understanding that the right artists and filmmakers can tackle severe subjects from comical perspectives and perhaps illuminate them better than their dramatic counterparts. 

They/Them fails for the same reason that these two films succeed. John Logan seemingly does not have the chops, at least not yet, to create a horror movie that succeeds in its horror. Due to this, the film's sincere attempts to scare its viewers become laughable - but this unintended comic element doesn't work in the way that But I'm a Cheerleader and The Producers do. Instead, it undermines the film's intended message and turns They/Them into a tonally-inconsistent mush of embarrassing horror and unfortunate caricatures.

They/Them was released on August 5, 2022 and is currently streaming on Peacock.