She's the He!
First screened and reviewed in January 2026
Director: Siobhan McCarthy. Cast: Misha Osherovich, Nico Carney, Malia Pyles, Tatiana Ringsby, Mark Indelicato, Suzanne Cryer, Emmett Preciado, Kyle Butenhoff. Screenplay: Siobhan McCarthy. In Brief:
Evident comic talent in several areas. Moving central turn by Osherovich. Premise, story, and theme are all muddled.
VOR:③
Movie's spirited conviction and affectionate disruption of old generic tropes are always palpable even when I quibbled with their execution.
I totally get the desire and even the need for trans and nonbinary work in the often tenaciously cis-het high school comedy space and to push those frontiers even further than Bottoms did. When She's the He! is working like that, the effect is thrilling. The film's shoestring budget is obvious, but so is its courage of conviction in casting and comic contrivance. Its funny bones are sturdy, it segues confidently at key moments into delicate sincerity, and the photography isn't half-bad. Talent abounds across the supporting cast. Best of all, Misha Osherovich gives a deft, poignant performance at the center of a supremely chaotic and thematically muddled film. Even when the script is charting her initial self-recognition and fully formed consciousness as a trans person faster than anything in the Fast and the Furious franchise, Osherovich makes credible sense of Ethan, plays a variety of big scenes very, very well, and gives She's the He! a big, tender heart.
Unfortunately, even as made by a nonbinary trans director and a majority trans/queer/nonbinary team, She's the He! has a bull-to-china-shop relation to its premise about two kids pretending to be trans, taking their "act" into girls' night parties and into single-gender locker rooms for increasingly hyperbolic plot reasons. I appreciate the movie's insistence that trans artists can't be so cowed by old tropes about transness as dress-up or deception or by hysteria about bathrooms and locker rooms that satire from the inside is off limits; the cultural discourse is more than fair to read as already farcical. But given the level of danger and precarity swirling around those issues, I admit to craving more care and sophistication about how She's the He! negotiates its internally silly but contextually volatile story conceits.
The worse problem is that the movie is entirely too in love with Alex, the horndog straight-man BFF to Osherovich's Ethan. Comedian Nico Carney has such zingy energy and comic timing that you can see why the filmmakers got besotted enough to afford him much more narrative space and comic showcasing than other versions of this story (if there were other versions?) probably would. Top billing feels like a miscalculation, but it's a clear sign of how McCarthy has proportioned their script. Carney's own transness seems to have served as a kind of alibi for letting Alex prove increasingly insensitive and outright destructive in his behaviors, even when "apologizing" for past affronts to both his alleged bestie and much of the viewing audience. McCarthy even hauls Alex in for a lame-brained and too-long Zany Hijinks interruption of one of the movie's most fragile, earnest, high-stakes encounters between two pivotal characters. It's not just Alex who's terrible at honoring or even identifying boundaries. It's McCarthy in their handling of Alex. Yes, the Jonah-in-Superbad trope of the nightmare buddy is endemic to this genre. But when so much else has been rethought from fresh perspectives in She's the He! (even the title seems somehow retrograde, however deliberately), why create one co-protagonist who doesn't just hog attention and brazenly undermine the other within the story but does the same at the meta-level of how the script has been shaped?
Like so many movies in this genre, She's the He! ends in a blooper reel, and while I was happy to watch this cut-up cast giggle and break, I caught myself watching Osherovich for signs that they were enjoying themselves on this project. All indications suggest that they did... but you don't really want to end a trans-made movie that's all about lifting up a trans character and rescuing a hidebound genre toward trans-friendly ends feeling worried that the main character and central performer might have had a rough time in the hands of ostensible allies. Or worrying about where and to whom you should recommend the film because for all its virtues and risk-taking and laughs, its sloppy construction and tricky rhetoric are very easy to read directly opposite to its signaled intents. Grade:C+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
