It's great having Bacon back in a summer camp slasher, and he certainly knows how to make the insidious most of every second of his screen time. The supporting cast of campers is also a suitably diverse bunch, with Germaine unsurprisingly making the most lasting impression. Other standouts include Quei Tann, Monique Kim, Anna Lore, Austin Crute, and Cooper Koch.

One member of the ensemble who didn't do much for me was Darwin del Fabro, but this has more to do with how their character is written than the actual performance. But as going into greater detail on this topic would be a massive spoiler, I'll just leave things there for now. Same with Anna Chlumsky's turn as the camp's inquisitive medic, Molly.

I believe the idea that Logan is going for is that the reasons behind the camp and what Owen and his staff are doing to the kids is far more grotesque than any of the brutal murders. As such, a lot of time is spent dwelling on the dehumanization of the campers, using methods ranging from the passive aggressive to the regressively heteronormative, from Stepford-ish reconditioning to violent physical abuse.

But it all becomes a hellish blur. Logan dwells on this disquieting nastiness in a manner that borders on cruel. He appears to take great relish in depicting every sadistic act. It's exhausting — and only gets worse as the film goes along.

There's a rancid twist roughly around the midway point that almost makes it feel like Logan is trying to say that the campers are responsible for how they are being treated. If Bacon didn't do such a superb job making Owen's malevolence crystal clear, I'd even go so far as to forgive viewers if they thought he was supposed to be looked at as something of a flawed antihero and not a monstrous force of unforgivable evil.

Then there is the reveal of the killer and the laundry list of the whys fueling their actions. I had it pegged early on who this masked menace was going to be, but I kept hoping my suspicions were going to be proven wrong. This reveal is infuriating, not because a character like this can't be a murderer, but because their reasons for choosing homicide as their retort to societal ills feed into tropes that are reprehensibly regressive.

Representation matters. But good intentions are not everything, and they can sometimes lead creators down paths that are even more despicable than pure exploitation ever wandered along even during the genre's 1970s—80s heyday (The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Sleepaway Camp). There are choices Logan makes with the material and characters that are so downright infuriating that just thinking about certain scenes makes my blood boil.

Again, I do have to be vague, as I know many will still give this film a look, so I don't want to inadvertently reveal any of its secrets. But in his attempt to broaden horizons and give a voice to a diverse group of LGBTQ+ characters while still staying true to the mechanics of the slasher genre, Logan ends up enforcing more ugly stereotypes than he deconstructs or subverts. They/Them hits like a punch to the face that's been coupled with a kick to the groin and augmented by a knife shoved straight into the viewer's back, and the longer it went on, the more I began to wish it didn't exist in the first place.