Stream It Or Skip It: ‘They/Them’ on Peacock, a Compelling Jumble of Slasher-Comedy and Earnest LGBTQ+ Drama

Be sure to pronounce it properly – you’ve gotta say “slash” when you read the title They/Them (now on Peacock). Clever, eh? This is an LGBTQ+ slasher flick that surely got greenlit after execs at Blumhouse, the utterly tireless churner-outer of horror movies, heard the following pitch: What if Camp Crystal Lake was a gay conversion camp? The cherry on top is Kevin Bacon, proud Friday the 13th alum, returning to the genre that helped launch his career. Now let’s find out if the final product lives up to its promise.

THEY/THEM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A woman drives alone through the deep, dark woods at night. Whump, smash, screech, no signal, rumble, groan, slow walking, slow slow walking, WHAP. That last one was the axeman, masked of course, ending her everything. Cut to: daytime. WHISTLER CAMP, reads a sign. RESPECT RENEW REJOICE, reads a sign beneath that sign. A busful of teens arrives. They’re greeted by Owen Whistler (Bacon), a man whose reassuring tones aren’t reassuring at all. Far from it. This is a camp where shitheel parents send their kids so they’ll come home not gay. Owen and his therapist wife Cora (Carrie Preston) run the place with a couple of counselors and a nurse, Molly (Anna Chlumsky), who’s new. And Groundskeeper Balthazar (Mark Ashworth) over there? Pay no mind to him and his creepy leering.

The kids look sad, uneasy, confused, angry or all of the above – wouldn’t you? – at the prospect of these f—ing people “straightening” them out. We hang with a few of them: Jordan (Theo Germaine) is non-binary, forced to stay in the boys’ cabin. Alexandra (Quei Tann) is secretly trans and can’t keep up the ruse; she’s also sent to the boys’ cabin. Toby (Austin Crute) is a flamboyant type who promised his parents he’d go to camp if they’d let him go see Moulin Rouge on Broadway. Kim (Anna Lore) is a rich suburbanite who can’t bear to admit she likes girls, and Stu (Cooper Koch) is a varsity-jacketed swimmer who can’t bear to admit he likes boys. Veronica (Monique Kim) is covertly researching a college paper on gay conversion therapy. They powwow with counselors for group “therapy” and share their heartbreaking stories in which they face disapproval and rejection.

Teenagers are always twisted up when it comes to defining and understanding who they are, but some of the people in this movie are even more knotted than usual. You sense their ache. And soon enough, Owen the meanie and his cretinous staff get to work twisting these kids up so tight, they may never come undone – which is a way of saying they’re sadistic, and not above intense psychological and physical torture. “I’m sure the Geneva Convention has some protocol about this,” snarks Veronica. But hey, what about the axe murderer, you may be asking. Yes, the axe murderer is still out there, waiting to pounce, and pounce they will.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Friday the 13th, of course, if it was crossed with Jason Blum-produced Netflix documentary Pray Away, about the gross abuses perpetrated by gay conversion outfit Exodus International. They/Them also half-asses the self-aware horror-movie commentary a la Scream and The Cabin in the Woods.

Performance Worth Watching: Germaine is rock-solid as our protagonist, giving shade and nuance to a slightly underwritten character who isn’t at all willing to roll over and accept things as they are. That said, Preston nearly steals the movie with a diabolically evil speech that would turn Hannibal Lecter into a puddle of goo.

Memorable Dialogue: Two exchanges that sum up this movie’s jarring tonal disparity:

Kim: I keep expecting Jason Voorhees to come out of those woods.

Veronica: Who?

And:

Alexandra: This camp. Do you even believe in any of this?

Molly: I believe in healing. That’s all.

Alexandra: Maybe you should believe in dignity.

Sex and Skin: Butts, faces in crotches, underwear-on dry-humping, going-at-its in the shadows of the camp’s Mystery Cabin.

Our Take: They/Them barely – just barely – functions more than it fails. We’re talking alarmingly close to a 51/49 ratio here. Writer/director John Logan (whose script credits include Rango, Hugo and Gladiator) will incur the wrath of horror-fanatic babies everywhere, who will decry the film for not being scary or gory enough, and maybe that’s true – it often plays like a Cuckoo’s Nest-ish rebellion drama with a cloaked homicidal maniac dropped in here and there. It’s earnest for a lengthy stretch, then it’s cheeky, then it’s frightening, less so for the in-goes-the-knife-out-goes-the-life stuff, more for the psycho Clockwork Orangeisms of Owen Whistler’s “therapeutic” “techniques.”

Logan manages to hold it all together though, lumpy as it is. He wisely hones in on Germaine’s calm, steady presence, which anchors the movie on righteous ground, and allows Bacon and Preston to let rip in the movie’s latter half. The somewhat typical comedy and horror fodder muddies the waters; chop it out, and the film might work quite well as a straightforward drama about teenagers dealing with identity crises. The young cast is strong enough to earn our empathy even in relatively brief moments of character development, far more than can be said for slasher films, which so rarely inspire us to give a fraction of a crap about their soon-to-be-dead teenagers.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Logan seems to shoehorn the horror conceit into the story so he can cleverly subvert a genre expectation or two via the LGBTQ+ context, which is just enough ambition to make They/Them worth a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream They/Them on Peacock