Them That’s Not (Review)A Quiet Room Full of Noise -

Them That’s Not isn’t the kind of film you just watch. It’s the kind that crawls under your skin, digs up all the places you thought you’d sealed off, and forces you to sit with a truth that most families would rather bury with the casket.

It opens with a repass — the kind of chaotic, overlapping, multi-generational storm only a Black family can orchestrate. Laughter, gossip, side-eyes, music too loud for the space. Every corner is alive. Everyone’s talking, everyone’s eating, everyone’s performing normalcy. But in the middle of all that noise stands Andrea “Drea” Stoney, a deaf queer poet trying to breathe inside a house that barely sees her.

Her grandmother’s brownstone holds decades of history, but none of it seems to include room for her voice. She’s surrounded by people who love the idea of her, not the reality. They avoid signing. They avoid asking how she’s holding up. They avoid anything that reminds them grief hits some of us differently — sharper, deeper, lonelier.

So she hides. In hallways, in quiet rooms, in the soft places grief makes when it has nowhere else to go.

Then her father walks in.

Samuel Stoney. Twenty years into a twenty-five-year sentence. Released for a few hours on furlough to say goodbye to the mother he couldn’t protect, couldn’t save, and barely had time to know. He’s not there to stir trouble. He’s not there to fix anything. He’s just a man who lost the last tether he had to the world outside concrete walls.

And his daughter, the one he left behind, the one he never learned to talk to — she’s right there. Two strangers with the same blood and the same wound, trapped in the same house, forced to face each other with no buffer. No excuses. No time.

The film doesn’t dramatize this reunion with explosions or shouting matches. It doesn’t need to. The tension between them is already a live wire. One wrong word and years of silence threaten to snap.

Angel Theory is devastating as Drea — sharply observant, quietly pissed off, and exhausted from carrying the burden of translating her existence for a world that can barely look at her long enough to listen. Her performance is all control on the outside and tremors on the inside. She doesn’t play grief; she wears it.

Biko Eisen-Martin brings the kind of presence that makes every scene feel like it’s holding its breath. His Samuel isn’t a stereotype, and he isn’t a redemption arc. He is a man who knows he lost years he can’t get back, looking at a daughter who had to grow whole without him.

The dialogue between them — sometimes spoken, sometimes signed, sometimes trapped in silence — hits like a body shot. There are lines that land quietly and still knock the wind out of you.

But the most striking part of Them That’s Not is the world around them. A family full of joy and chaos that masks its fractures with music and casseroles. A house overflowing with life while two people inside it are barely holding theirs together. A room full of voices drowning out the one voice that needs to be heard.

The director refuses to make grief delicate. This film gives you the kind of mourning that isn’t poetic or picturesque — the kind that’s messy, isolating, embarrassing, inconvenient. The kind you feel in your teeth.

And even though the film sits deeply in silence, it never drags. The directing has the same pacing as a confession you didn’t mean to make. It pulls you closer, forces you to lean in, and then hits you with moments of stillness that feel louder than any argument.

By the time the credits hit, you’re left with the unsettling truth the film has been whispering from the start:

Sometimes the people who are supposed to know you best don’t know you at all.
And sometimes the person you least expect is the one who finally sees you.

Them That’s Not doesn’t go for emotional safety. It swings hard and lands every blow. It is heavy, honest, intimate, beautifully raw. A rare film that refuses to let its characters — or the audience — hide behind comfort.

It may be built on grief, but it’s really about the dangerous, merciful, fragile act of trying to reach someone before time runs out.

This one stays with you.