January 18th, 2026

Mental Health, Love, and Shipping

They Look Like People is an independent horror film about an Axis 1 (Schizophrenic) person and an Axis 2 (Narcissistic) person deeping their bond and undergoing a mental health transformation. It's mostly about the way the dominating illnesses play off each other and the way their intimacy causes them to go on various ups and downs. It's honestly spectacular, and I love the way it plays with ambiguity, in the obvious sense, but moreso in the non-obvious sense. It's fun for the audience to not know what's going on, but there's a definitive authorial intent behind making one particular fact unknown (if you know you know), and I think the fact is that we are not supposed to care what the outcome was. In context, it's chilling. It's a movie about the extent you can spend towards rehabilitation and what the limits are.

They Look Like People centers a male-male friend dynamic. They're extremely emotionally intimate and mature, and I found myself falling in love with them. I wanted them to end up as a couple. I wanted to see them kiss. I don't know how much of that was intentional. I'm not sure what it says that I found this relationship to be romantic in nature, and what it means for some of the ([un]fortunately?) platonic friendships I hold on to. Other queer polyamorous baby gays also wanted them to kiss. Young-in-transition people in the middle of second puberty renegotiating their basic concepts of love and friendship wanted them to kiss just like me. Am I a baby gay who doesn't know what platonic love is? Or was there homosexual tension in the movie? Kind of can't say. Makes me think about Nine Sols and my "incest" ship in that...