Football-focused horror film Him starts strong before fumbling over and over | Canada Voices

Him

Directed by Justin Tipping

Written by Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie and Justin Tipping

Starring Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers and Julia Fox

Classification 14A; 96 min

Opens in theatres Sept. 19

Professional football is one of the most racially marked institutions in American culture. For decades now, the spectacle of the sport has become inextricably linked to questions of labour, exploitation and the racialized identity. It’s a history so long and documented that the racism experienced specifically by Black American quarterbacks has its own Wikipedia page.

It makes sense then, that a film such as HIM, the sports horror flick and sophomore feature from Dear White People and The Chi director Justin Tipping, might find this history to be a compelling screen subject, especially given the relative creative freedoms afforded by genre filmmaking.

With marketing that focuses almost solely on the role of producer Jordan Peele (the theatrical poster for the film set up at a recent advance screening did not even clearly note Tipping’s name or role as director), audiences should be forgiven for their assumptions that HIM might offer a variation on the apt and entertaining political visions seen in Peele’s work.

With a script and direction headed up by an entirely non-Black team, the film is co-written by Tipping alongside Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie. It stars Tyriq Withers (2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer) as Cameron Cade, the league’s next rising football star whose entire life and identity have revolved around the sport. Cameron, who grew up in a football family, was raised by a father who instilled in him at a young age the importance of sacrifice – physical, emotional and spiritual – as the defining tenet of what it means to be a man.

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It’s a core belief that follows Cameron through to the league’s combine, where he is a top pick to replace long-time star quarterback (and lifelong idol), Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans, here, in a rare dramatic-ish role), of the fictional San Antonio Saviors. The night before the event, however, Cameron is brutally attacked and suffers a potentially career-ending traumatic brain injury. Unsettled by the uncertainty of his future prospects, Cameron jumps at an invitation from Isaiah to recover and train with him at his expansive, yet stark compound in a remote desert location.

A cavernous memento mori of White’s career accomplishments – achievements that are nearing their final chapter, curtailed by the inevitabilities of age and injury – the sprawling estate offers an almost monastic setting for the intense and psychologically charged mentorship that Isaiah conducts with his protégé. As Cameron is pushed to his physical and emotional limits, the boundaries between elite level training, psychological manipulation, and psychic deterioration begin to blur, effecting a hallucinatory nightmarescape that sees Cameron act as witness to, and then, actor in White’s grisly, cultish rituals.

Replete with grisly scenes of medical horror and heavy-handed religious (and patriotic, for here they are one and the same) symbolism, HIM is a visually bold and creatively ambitious take on the extractive nature and perpetual cost of ambitions of greatness, if not godliness, athletic or otherwise. Unfortunately, the film is unable to extract itself from under the weight of its influences (think similarly burdened films like Sam Levinson’s The Idol, Oz Perkins’s Longlegs or Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow).

The movie’s second half veers almost into the territory of music video, resting on free association of clumsily-utilized, symbolically charged imagery while losing complete grasp of its own internal narrative threads. While HIM’s visual and cinematographic landscapes might be stylistically evocative at times, they lack in narrative substance and a discerning formal logic, reducing images and themes rife with narrative potential into a series of hollowly aestheticized surfaces that squander the film’s own potential as well as the talent of its actors (one might think here especially of Wayans, who has not often been afforded many noncomedic starring roles, despite his against-type turn in 2000’s Requiem for A Dream).

Even with all of its broken bones and blood-streaked faces, HIM feels oddly sanitized within the context of the charged cultural terrain of football in the U.S., where bodies are pushed to breaking points, commodified for the sake of spectacle, and then abandoned once they can no longer perform. This disposability is not incidental – it is the foundation of football’s labour structure.

And while HIM’s fantastical, genre-forward engagement with these realities is absolutely one of the film’s central themes, the combination of its undercooked, nonsensical final act and lack of commitment in witnessing the Blackness of its two lead characters – an experience that is inextricable from that context – feels like a glaringly obvious missed opportunity.

It’s an all-too-conspicuous oversight that effectively abstracts these characters into a universal moral tale of masculinity and sacrifice, wholly unbound from the clear lived specificity of their Blackness. And the fact that the film’s marketing so clearly trades on the Blackness of its lead characters, producer and intended audience – without seemingly giving thought to the fact that a film that considers this Blackness as central to these themes has been long overdue – is just salt on the wound.

Unlike his filmmaker peers who have been likewise criticized for their devotion to style over substance, Tipping applies his glossy, creative director-esque vision to a cinematically underexplored subject that demands intellectual sharpness alongside its stylized play with generic conventions.

In the end, despite the guts and the glory, it is that failure that becomes the loudest aspect of the film.

Special to The Globe and Mail