In THEY/THEM (2022), a group of teens sent to a gay conversion camp discover its sinister methods and hypocrisy, while a masked killer invades. It’s an interesting setup with quite a bit of potential, and while I liked it better than I think most people did–it got a 24% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics didn’t like it much better–I found it overall underwhelming.
The film introduces us to the teens, who came to the camp for various reasons. (I’m amazed and horrified camps like this still exist, but they do.) Some of the kids are tired of struggling and want to be “cured,” thinking they will suffer less. Others are being forced by their parents. The amount of nuance and complexity in the framing in the first act is surprisingly good. Even the camp counselors, led by its owner played by the great Kevin Bacon, seem to be overall accepting and offering tools for change instead of harsh pressure and compulsion.
In the second act, things get an abrupt change as we find out the counselors are not what they seem, and the kids begin to take a whole different lesson from their experience at the camp, which is to try to accept themselves for who they are. When the slasher finally shows up, it plays out more like a device about defining oneself than a cause of real horror. I didn’t know one could make the slasher trope so meh, but the film accomplishes it nicely.
The result is a movie that doesn’t seem to really decide what it wants to be. The slasher element is dull and again plays more as a metaphorical device rather than anything driving the plotting, so it doesn’t work as a slasher, and even as a device, it seems tacked on instead of something that is thematically integral. The drama starts off complex and interesting, only to squander this on some campiness and easy resolutions and resistance against cardboard-cutout villains.
Despite all that, I didn’t hate it, and it has a lot going for elements of it if not the whole working together. I have to give the film credit for its sensitive framing of what it likely means to be queer and the queer experience. This seems to be the movie its maker wanted to make, and it might have been far better if it had focused on that, carrying it through as a complex drama without the traditional masked killer element. Anyway, check it out if you’re looking for something different and innovative in a slasher.
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