Nietzche wrote, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” In these moments where Wyatt battles the uncanny, struggling with his inability to tell human from demon as his fiancée’s face literally becomes an abyss, They Look Like People brings this quote to life. Wyatt buys axes and knives, trains himself to use a nail gun as a weapon, and stockpiles sulfuric acid, all on the instruction of mysterious voices that come to him in the night; is he really preparing to fight monsters, or is he himself the monster?

On a deeper level, They Look Like People is about two men struggling to find some sort of human connection (if you forget that one of them doesn’t think humans exist anymore) in a world where both have failed to live up to society’s idea of what a man should be.

Before a date, Christian gives himself a pep talk in the mirror, telling himself not to be “a bitch.”

While the film spares us too much background exposition, we can deduce that Christian was made fun of a lot when he was younger — we see a photo of him and Wyatt in high school and Christian looked far nerdier, and there are references to Christian as “the skinny one.” So he has turned to working out, spending hours in the gym to buff up, and he listens every chance he gets to an audio recording that tells him, “You are a mountain. You are a hundred miles high. All that your enemies place in your way — betrayals, lies, poison — you devour and become stronger. You are invincible. Those that try to hurt you will turn silent and will bow down.” Nonsense, in other words. When he realizes that Wyatt’s seriously struggling, Christian scrolls aimlessly through a website titled “How to be a Friend Indeed to a Friend In Need.” And Christian wants “a million kids” — a desire to reproduce, that most masculine of pursuits.

But he has failed. Like Wyatt, his fiancée was driven away — why, we’re not sure. It might have something to do with the fact that he’s rarely in the movie without a glass of alcohol in his hands. He may be more conventionally attractive right now, but he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at his job, and his fiancée has left him, preventing him — for the moment anyway — from becoming the father he wants to be. Despite the self-help websites and the motivational mumbo-jumbo, he’s not the man he wants to be.

As for Wyatt, he’s starting to believe that no one is the man he wants them to be — namely, human. He, too, seems to have driven away his fiancée; he claims that she cheated on him and left him, which certainly could be received as emasculating enough, but as the movie progresses we get the sense that he had some sort of psychotic break when he hallucinated that she was no longer human (or saw through her disguise?). Adrift with no female support structure, Wyatt clings to the one thing that makes him feel more manly — what he believes is his destiny to take up arms against an evil invading force and protect the world. Violence! Hoo-rah.

“Can I ask you something?”

I also appreciated that there wasn’t a single “no homo” moment to be found in the film. Generally, when films are about intensely-close relationships between men, there tend to be moments put into the script purely to prove to us that both men are heterosexual and have no sexual interest in each other whatsoever. Their initial reconnection on the street is awkward and uncomfortable in such a way that would absolutely suggest a past romantic history were one of them a woman, but the film never feels the need to clarify whether they were or weren’t any more than friends. Instead, they share jeans, hang around the apartment in their boxers, and even help each other shave, without a single moment where they feel uncomfortable with their intimacy and need to prove to themselves that they’re straight. It’s refreshing.

They Look Like People is well worth a watch, not just because its creepy, tense moments are phenomenally creepy and tense. In addition to the demons and devilry at work here, the film also functions as a critique of the Chosen One trope, a touching look at several forms of mental illness and addiction, and a testament to the healing power of unselfconscious male homosocial relationships to overcome evils both real and imagined. It’s a fantastically promising debut for director Perry Blackshear, and I can’t wait to see what everyone involved does next.